@Nightmare Good points for sure.
The noise was actually much worse in the video because of the fact that the unit was laying on its side, causing much more pressure to be on those surfaces than normal. There is usually no weight at all on them, since the mechanism deploys straight down.
If I had to do it over again, I would have laid the unit on its back, not on its side.
As for the root cause of the noise, it looked to me that everything was aligned properly, but I may have missed something. Time will tell, and I am definitely keeping an eye (and ear) on it as I use it on the water, to make sure there is nothing amiss.
Oh, and as for disassembling and removing, it literally only takes 4-5 minutes to do so. Another few minutes to spray it with lube and 5 minutes to put it back on. 15ish minutes total.
The tilt bracket would definitely cut that down to less than 5 minutes, but not sure that I want to drop $200 for that bracket quite yet