Does anyone have any advice about repairing an automatic antenna mast on a C5 convertable?

 

Well you need to figure out what is wrong with it first. This was off another post that i saved in my personal notes.



Was disgusted that I found out by other forum members that the power antenna is un-repairable.. Well it is.

My antenna would go up but it would not go down.. Thinking the ribbon on the mast was broken I yanked it out to take a look.. Well the ribbon was not broken. Something else was keeping it from going down..

So I tried to open the spool housing.. NOT... seems the damn factory decided to melt these little plastic rivets holding the cover on.. Ensuring they get $150 forcing you to buy a replacement unit.

Well a Dremel solved that problem... A few minutes later the rivets were gone and I popped the cover..

I did not take a picture of what I found to be the problem but I will describe it. Very simple fix

Once you remove the Spool cover and the spool you can see where the ribbon gets fed into it. You will then see a little hole right in the middle of the ribbon path. There is a little Pin in there and the pin is used for an axle for the rolling ribbon guide under the spool.

Well the pin was up high and blocking the the path of the ribbon thus not allowing it go down. I used a pair of needle nose pliers and pushed the PIN Axle all the way back in and out the the path of the Ribbon..

Problem solved..

Now I had to re-fasten the Spool cover back on. I simply drilled each opening and installed 4 little screws to hold it on. I have attached the picture to show that.



****** If the mast needs replacing you can get it from two places****EBAY LINK for Mast

or one of our vendors MidAmerica

Cheers

 

My 2K hard top has a fixed antenna but my '88 had a similar problem. I found there was 3 wires going to it and the one that lowered it was broken. A simple splice fixed it. Take a look at the wiring.

Mike