updating winegard antenna worm gear

[HandyDan]

My old Winegard antenna has the round shaft on the worm gear.  When you don't apply silicone spray to the worm gear at least twice yearly, you end up with a worm gear that will no longer elevate.  That was my dilemma.  I had stripped out the worm gear and the antenna just lay there.  Soooo, I went to my local RV dealer and tried to find just the worm gear.  It is held on with two slip pins and should be fairly easy to replace.  But, nooooooo.  Winegard decided to make the process more difficult and more expensive.  Instead of just the worm gear you must buy the whole shaft and a replacement handle.  The new shaft is hexagonal and has a different design on the worm gear.  You have to cut the shaft 1/4" longer than the old shaft.  You will be replacing several metal parts with plastic.  Like a lot of things, they made them more substantial in the old days.  Just think car bumpers. 

The process isn't hard but there are some difficult parts to the procedure.  The new shaft has instructions included for converting from the round to hex, but they weren't real clear to me.  I am a visual person and there weren't any illustrations to show what I should be taking out.  In the picture you will see all the parts that need to come out of the gear housing before the new shaft will fit.  What they don't tell you is how hard the brass sleeve bearing is to remove.  I resorted to an ice pick to pry into the inside part of the sleeve and lever it up a bit.  Then I went inside the coach and stuck the ice pick up the hole and pushed the sleeve up the rest of the way.  After the sleeve is out, putting the new shaft in was fairly easy.  You have to push pretty hard to get the end of the worm gear to seat in the hole, but once in you just have to reassemble all the parts.  Don't forget to spray the gears with silicone spray or you will be doing this all over again, soon. 

In the first picture you see all the parts that you will be discarding.  The second picture is the new parts.  Third picture are the new and old with the new shaft cut to fit.  The fourth is the tools I used for the conversion.  The foam paint brush was used to clean out the gear housing from dirt, bugs, and whatnot.  I couldn't have done it without the ice pick.  I forgot to include the hacksaw for cutting off the new shaft.