Masts

Well as part of my needing to practise wiring I fitted trap wires to the jolly old EPS of joy, it has a two part mast, although I seem to remember fitting the wires below the joint, it has so far done the job, not that I've dealt with any serious wind using it, that's what the Farr works best in.

This reminds me of my quest for cheaper carbon masts, given the average cost of 6 mtrs of raw carbon tube can be had for as little as £130.00 I've always felt two grand is just a little excessive in what we're expected to pay for masts and I've yet to come across anything particularly sophisticated, nor its bend curve actually matched to the luff curve of any given sail, that may be the case in some other classes, naturally I've never studied the Finn which is rumoured to have quite 'trick' masts, but I bet they don't even try for a designed luff curve mismatch.

It's such a pity classes don't come together to discuss their mutual needs, take the Streaker for example it needs a carbon mast, they're all lightweights, arguably there's a case for the Solution going down the carbon mast route and don't even mention the Solo.. If there were a consortium of classes, then the boot could be on our foot instead of the other way round and we get a grip of these stupid prices y'all get conned into.

I've never ordered a mainsail for any mast, tin or plastic, without doing the measurements of spar bend. Its routine in the development classes.

And yes, its by no means unknown to customise a carbon spar to change the bend. I've done it. Of course you need a new or possibly altered sail to match the altered spar.

Edited by JimC - 19 Dec 18 at 6:36pm

By and large with dinghies my experience, FWIW, is that by the time you have a hull shell that has adequate panel stiffness and dent resistance there isn't an awful lot more needs to be done to the skin. Given the extreme rigging loads used these days you do need to control compression loads, but an awful lot of that can be done by good design at deck level. I've never really thought about what loads might be like on an unstayed rig, it seems so inferior from POV of rig weight, mast size, bend control etc that I've never really considered it.

Now I think of it I tend to use mast posts/stumps, and that possibly has some of the same structural challenges as an unstayed rig. The concern with the post is handling very large kicking strap loads. The post on my Cherub was in fact the bottom of a Finn mast reinforced, but above the post the real spar was way lighter and thinner than any unstayed mast.

Originally posted by E.J. It wasn’t very nice to sail and diapered quickly. So it can be done, but don’t.