We had a tower built last year. We used the base kit supplied by Southwest Windpower and took that to a stainless fabricator who supplied the 1.5" main tube and the 1" braces. Some sizing of the 1.5" tube is required where it fits on the generator and on the base kit, they did a very nice job of that. They also built a crane into it for lifting the 9.9 hp four stroke dinghy outboard. It is mounted on the starboard aft corner, it goes through the stern seat there against the rail. One brace runs forward and it bolted onto the flat side deck close to the turning block. The other brace runs across the stern and is bolted to the top of our dinghy davits. It was very difficult trying to figure out how to mount the braces due to all the junk we have going on back there and the angles specified for the braces by Southwest Wind. There is rubber on all the mounts where they touch the boat. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it. But it does work well, especially the crane part, that works very slick.

Only thing I am going to change is the wiring, it currently runs inside the SS main post and it is 8 gauge so very inflexible, you cannot bend it or fold it in there, so it is not possible to leave any extra wire for removing the generator. This fall when we took it down to cover the boat for winter it was a huge pain, I left 3 feet of slack inside the back locker to enable removing it for winter but it is very difficult to feed that through the cable clam and the hole into the SS main post at the bottom. So I am going to remove the wiring from inside the pole and run it outside through a conduit and join it nearer to the top. I'll only be leaving about an 8" pigtail on the generator, just enough to get below the gen base itself and outside the tube to connect to the power cable. Won't be as clean looking but it will be much easier to live with since removing and installing it is going to be an annual feature now.

One thing you need to do is check all the bolts on the braces and mounting points monthly, they will loosen up from vibration even with split washers and when they do it will start to be a bit noisy. Don't expect massive power from this unit unless you get massive wind, but it will start making power at much lower wind speeds than other units will, even in a light 7-10 knot breeze it will make enough to float our fridge unit and electronics overnight. With 20 knot wind it will make 12 to 16 amps which is a lot for our needs.

I personally like the white noise from the unit when its running, my wife finds it annoying though and usually we shut it off at night. Wouldn't be an issue if we were V-berth sleepers but we use the aft cave. It's rarely needed anyway with our solar so no big deal, it was really just installed as an alternative to the solar on cloudy windy days and something else to get more use out of the dinghy engine crane.

Garhaur in California probably has a tower that will fit... that's where I got my radar tower, and they ship so it doesn't matter where you are.

Three years ago we mounted an Air Breeze to our 1979 Catalina 36. We already had a Garhauer Engine Lift so worked with that. The following is from our blog re installation:

We realized the Garhauer engine lift that we already had was modular and made out of stainless steel. It’s designed to lift up to 150 pounds of engine on and off our dinghy. We found that we could buy from Garhauer another 30 inch stainless tube for about $50 and some anodized aluminum collars for $20 each. The 30 inch tube allowed us to place the generator at least 90 inches above the deck, while the aluminum collars allowed us to attach stainless tubing to the deck and backstay for stability.

we needed to do was cut an elliptical hole in the engine lifting bracket to allow us to still use the engine lift but to also add the 30 inch stainless tube to the system. We found a machinist who could cut the bracket elliptically to insert the tube.

See the accompanying picture.

The next problem was running the wire inside the 2 inch diameter tube. We selected 0.5 inch wire, which was the standard 30 amp service wire to connect a boat to shore power. The only problem was that with this size wire, we needed to drill out the Garhauer Delrin ball to that size and somehow keep the strength of the ball intact. This is one of those problems only solved overnight. I was working on the boat the next morning and Lee comes by. He awoke in the middle of the night and realized that if we separated the wires in the bundle, they would only be 0.25 inches each.. I immediately went home and drilled out both the Delrin ball and the stainless bracket with 3 separate quarter inch holes.

We now had a system that was all stainless and all the wiring was internal. We then installed an ammeter on our control panel to monitor the input to the batteries. We can now monitor the battery inputs from the AirBreeze and the high output generator as well as the output of the house battery.

Hope this helps.

Spindrift,
"our 1979 Catalina 36" ??????? The C36 wasn't introduced until 1982 (1983 model year).

Hey Bud. I am running the same size cable for our wind gen as well. Flat 3 wire.I made my own post out of schudle 40 2" alum conduit just before my base I have a slot where my wire exits. Then I use a clam shell as you but maybe a little bigger? Then it visa in to the aft locker as yours and I used a terminal strip. Sa I gave had to remove lutz a few times for maintenance. Just a thought.