Replacing mast step- won't budge.

So I broke my mast step the other day, on a 16 from the late 70's. So i drilled out the rivets, and loosened the nuts on the striker. And After two hours of hammering, It still hasn't come off. I'm going to guess that its corroded , or that i am just a very new rookie who doesn't know anything. Any idea?

Matt Miller wrote a good article "Getting in Step" on replacing a H16 mast step in the January - February 2005 Hobie Class News pages 14 & 15:

https://media.hobie.com/2010_archive/support/pdfs/h16-step-replace.pdf

_________________
Tim
84 H16
82 H16
87 H14T
Tortola Sails: 115222
Blue Prism Sails: 88863
Clearwater, FL

I had the same issue about a year ago. I have a late 70s boat as well. I tried all the tricks but finally wound up removing one of the corner castings so that I could remove the tensioner bar. Then I had to loosen the striker with a large pipe wrench (wrapped in a towel to protect the steel) finally a rubber mallet and a chisel broke the stubborn thing free. After it was off I found that there is a block of wood that is inside the crossbar that swells and locks the striker in place. I assume newer boats don’t have this. Reassembly went much better. Good luck

My boat is an 86 and I recently took the mast step casting off to replace the ds post. I didn't notice a block of wood in the crossbar but that could be an older boat thing. The problem that I ran into was that the threads on the ds post were caught on the top hole of the cross bar. I ultimately had to use a large hammer to force the ds post through. Once I got it moving with the bigger hammer it came out fairly quick. When I removed the mast step and ds post I needed to smooth out the hole a little where the threads were caught on the crossbar.