Mast
I purchased an extrusion from Rolly Tasker sails and had Taskers perform all the mast fabrication and welding. I had the mast delivered to my property and stowed it outside the shed until I could find the time to sand it and paint it. The mast was sanded, primed and then given 3 coats of Wattyl Poly U400. The mast is 16.75m long, once painted all the rigging and wiring lights etc was installed. Diamonds are 5/16" thick. Cap shrouds and forestay is 7/16". Hit a problem here, could not decide whether to use 3/8 or 7/16 for the cap shrouds and forestay. Trouble is once you start thinking about that and taking advice its very difficult to go down. Now the cost difference is not huge but one thing that was stalling me was that the pin size on the larger turnbuckle would not fit through the mast fittings or the fitting on the beam for the forestay, the stainless insert hole was just too small. In the end I went to the larger wire and had bigger inserts made. Cheap to get manufactured and quite easy to fit. Drill the hole to within 0.5mm less than OD of you insert and pull the insert through with a high tensile fine threaded bolt, once you have the knack only takes 20mins or so an insert. Think I spent more time thinking about how to do it than doing it. The length of the forestay was just calculated by working out heights of fixing points and reproducing this outside the shed with the mast laid on its side. Cap shrouds were just ordered a metre too long to be made up on the day.
Mast Track
Is Antal 50 series, great product makes raising and lowering the main a breeze, could not do without it. The track was fastened to the mast by drilling and tapping. Not as big a job as one would think, get good drills, and use a portable drill to tap the holes, only broke one tap, there is about 100 holes I think. I did not use Antal intermediate cars as my batterns are quite close together, saving over $1000.00.
Other Stuff
The dingy is raised and lowered with triple block tackles - its easy.
Deck Organisers bring all the lines back to the cockpit, sail handling is real easy, you do have to go to the mast to put in a reef but only to loop the luff strap around the horns near the boom to mast join.
I have a 2m prodder pole that the spinnaker flies from, manufactured by Almast Spars
Trampolines are made from 6mm polyester rope woven like a tennis racket, fixings were simple plastic mast sliders that ran in track in the forbeam and on the catwalk. Fastening to the hull was done by glassing some pvc pipe to the hull, vertical slots were cut at the right spacing, in these slots stainless chain links were inserted and all held with a piece of long rod inside the pvc pipe - see pics. Real good, when in a seaway any water coming over the bow just passes straight through with no resistance at all, probably cheaper than your conventual tramp, easier to fix anywhere in the world.
Lazy Jacks are used to hold the mainsail cover - with a little practice it possible to round up into the wind at the end of a days sail, at the right time let the main haliyard run and the main self stows in 2 seconds
