I also measured how high the chain would be above the windlass base to get a sense of whether or not I'd need to raise the chainstopper more. It's going to be close, depending on how high the anchor roller is. Most likely, it will need that additional inch.
Once I had things reasonably sorted out, I sat down with a glass of Cabernet and savored both the wine and the fine piece of machinery at my feet. The windlass itself is all beautifully polished stainless steel, so it will never corrode like the typical aluminum or mild steel windlasses. The yellow fluted base at the bottom end of the motor is a silicone rubber casting, with a clever pull-out bottom that allows access to the electrical terminals, but maintains a seal.
Once I had mellowed out a bit, I did a bit of head-scratching about how I'm going to build the rest of the windlass base on the deck. The difficulty is that the deck is convex and has a raised narrow platform in the center where the old windlass was. I think I've come up with a workable and effective method, but it will will require some fancy fiberglass work. Stay tuned to see if it works!
I had a 5/16 inch cobalt drill bit (which is what it takes to drill through stainless), so that was the size I chose for mounting holes. Using water as the drill lubricant (a tip I got from a machinist), the drilling went more quickly than expected. Unfortunately, the holes in the chainstopper I bought were 1/4 inch, so I had to drill them out so that they would match the holes in the base tube. That was no big deal in itself, but it meant that the counter-sinks for the heads of the flathead bolts wouldn't be big enough. Because I didn't want to spent $100 on a 3/4 inch cobalt drill bit (if I could find one), I ended up grinding down the bolt heads using a grinder and the drill press as a makeshift lathe. It worked fine. I scrounged some free pieces of white acrylic sheet from TAP Plastics' scrap bin, cut them to size for end caps for the stainless tube, and then cut rabbets around them, hoping to get them to be a press fit. Amazingly, it worked perfectly. 
When the new windlass arrives, I'll see how close I came to getting the chainstopper the right height. I'm anticipating I may need to raise it a bit further by putting the stainless tube on top of a 1-inch teak base, which is no problem.
I used the old VHF antenna wire as the messenger to pull the new one through. In the process, I quickly found out why it was no good: it broke apart a few inches from the masthead end. As usual, the first 50 feet through the mast was easy; getting out the last 3 inches was the challenge. Removing the chrome exit tube fitting at the bottom of the mast finally did the trick.
While the task would have been impossible without the wire fish tape I had bought, it was still difficult. I soon discovered that there was no way to extract the end of the tape from the hole by the radar mount, which would have allowed me to pull the antenna cable down to the base of the mast with the connector at the right end. Instead, I had to thread the fish tape from the top down, struggle to get it out the base, attach some 1/8 inch line to it, then pull the tape and line back out the top. I then attached the cable to the line and pulled it back down the mast. Because the base of the mast already had a couple of large drainage holes in the bottom, at least I could peer inside, see what was going on and pull or push things around with a bent coathanger wire. When I finally got the plug end of the cable down to the base, it was these extra holes that made the effort to get the plug back out the hole merely tedious and frustrating instead of completely futile.
