Mast
Fall and winter 2005

After looking forever to find a set of drawings for a carbon mast I finally found a designer that sold me the blue prints for a 17.5 m (57') solid carbon wing mast and after studying the plans I started collecting the materials. I contacted the folks at V2 composites and they sold me 140lbs of unidirectional carbon, this will get mixed with the same weight of Pro-Set epoxy. If we include some of the other stuff that gets bolted on or run through the mast I should end up with roughly a 350 lbs mast tube. This is a short span wing mast that will rotate ( I hope) when it gets mounted onto the boat.

This is the carbon:

The mast is going to be 57' long so I had to make a table long enough to lay it on, it started out by clearing a "little" brush away
    
 

I then transferred the shape of the stations from the plans to plywood

Then cut out the plywood frames.

And here is the complete set.

I then started to put the frames together on the long table

Mold being completed, You are looking here at the mast base where the bottom 500mm is tapered.
  

And the first half popped out of the mold

I then took the ends of the mold and reversed these so that the second mold was a mirror image of the first one. The mast has a pre-bend build into it so I used the completed half to align the frames for the second mold (I thought that it would be convenient if the two halves would actually mate up)

Dan Dereszinsky and Jose Lopez are having way to much fun playing with epoxy as they are helping me laminate the second half of the mast.

After the two halves were completed I ended up putting local reinforcements and stiffeners into the mast as well as attachments for the spectra webbing that will  take the place of traditional chain plates.

And in the middle of the mess of torn off peel ply and mold pieces is a WHOLE mast, the halves mated up perfectly. Next I will clean off some of the epoxy adhesive that oozed out from the joints and then I will tape over the joints with a carbon fiber tape.

After the halves were glassed together I had to make the attachments for the diamond stays  these are vacuum bagged onto the mast
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The masthead is close to completion. The fiberglass tube is part of the lightning protection system. A carbon fiber mast after being hit by lightning makes for a pretty expensive doorstop so I have a lightning dissipater on the masthead attached to a number 4 wire that exits the mast a couple of feet up from the base where there will be a connector to connect another wire that grounds to the water in lightning conditions. This is hopefully enough to protect my mast in case of a lightning strike. The hole in the mast is an attachments for the running backs

These are the pads where the winch and the sheet stoppers are bolted to:

 

At this point I have to finish the gooseneck and the spreaders, finish the masthead and then the mast gets faired and painted.