The boat shop is busy again now that (a) Griffin is officially a NorCol Golden Bear, (b) Colin closed on the duplex in Virginia and (c) Jeanne’s folk’s San Jose house is ready for rent (that last one took us a solid 5 day push to get done!)

Here’s how the mast foot finished up. The perpendicular centered web of aluminum that Keith asked for was installed before building the new end cap.

While the bonding putty dried, we went back to re-attaching the 175 Tides mainsail track clips.

This was done on Carter Time – an unfortunate reality warp wherein the husband asks the wife to come over and help put these screws in …”it’ll take us about an hour”. Three hours later, plus a trip to Fastenal for more screws because someone painted the heads of the originals, making them useless, and the wife is returned home. Carter time sometimes applies to mountain biking but seems primarily to be an acute problem around the boats. Has anyone else been cursed with this affliction ?

After the new web, the cap was bonded and carbon-wrapped. The nylon-insert backing nuts holding the SS cup got red Loctite are now entombed, but we don’t expect they’ll ever need to be touched.

After a few more hours of installing hardware (gooseneck, sail track, etc) the rebuilt mast was complete. At 225 lbs we needed a new way to get it atop the trailer. Hmmm- look how the beam extends about 36″ out the eave of the neighbor’s roof…

Late Saturday afternoon the shops neighborhood was deserted so we grabbed the ladder and bolted the chain hoist to that beam. With the mast on rollers Jeanne and I pushed it up against that building, lifted it 8′ in the air with the hoist and then drove the trailer in very close to the building. One local guy took pity and came over to help us steer / push the mast in to place atop the float and the whole thing was pretty smooth (but always stressful to lift these big expensive parts way up high!). No photos were taken – we had our hands full. Here the mast clears the pickup cab by 2 feet and overhangs the float end by about 4′

So here at the end of August “the big parts” are all on trailers, stored and ready for launch – floats, mast, beams and daggerboard. The main hull needs a week of final glassing bits and fairing, and all of its exterior paint. The interior is 95% prepped for final paint, which will be sprayed this week. After paint is done both inside and out, we’ll do wiring then plumbing and finally install all the deck hardware. It’ll be a very busy September in the shop.

Today we finished up the mast spreaders and prepared the last two feet of the mast for its new base attachment.

Good news for Stephen and Curtis, Jim Antrim, Guy Stevens and Keith – all that deflection at the spreaders is now totally gone; the walls are much stiffer!

Here’s the last foot or so of the mast before and after removing the steel pivot pin:

And here’s the relative size of the new cup that has to get mounted inside the mast:

Stay tuned for a proper plan on fixing this cup solidly…

What a relief to get some paint back on the mast! All those sail track screw holes were tapped, fairing done, and some epoxy primer rolled on.

Then we made a composite base for a steel pad eye just below the upper spreader as the terminal for the check stays, part of the running backstay system. After the base cured it got some carbon exterior reinforcement to maintain proper position.

Late today the spreaders were bonded back on and tomorrow they’ll get carbon tape reinforcement.

The surface looks good just in primer, so we’re eager for final paint during the week. Note to the future: the mast surface shows some minor flat spots / deviations. This is due to six added layers of hand layup (vs the original structure’s vac bagging) and overlapping fabrics. We chose not to add the cosmetic-only fairing weight it would have taken for a full-smooth finish.

And since we’ve gone this far with the mast, we decided to tackle an old concern. The mast currently has a 1″ stainless steel pin sticking out the bottom. This pivot-pin is received on deck in a stainless steel box with a delrin cylinder machined out the same size as the pin. The mast would rotate freely around the pin but could not tilt in any direction. The mast builder is also the designer of the Contour 34 tri, and we saw first hand on that boat how this constrained pin had busted the SS deck box welds. So we want to replace the system with a steel ball mounted on the deck and a matching cup inside the foot of the mast. Here are the new parts from Skateaway Design that need to get mounted.

The SS cup will get bolted to a horizontal plate and somehow attached to the mast walls. The white delrin slides up in to the SS cup.
Then the new trailer hitch ball needs to get bolted to the deck plate box. Here it’s just resting on top.

I think we can weld a small plate on top of the box to receive the ball, and drill a large hole on the bottom of the box for access to the big nut that secured the hitch ball to the base box.
We’ll show you the hard part – securing the cup inside the mast – once the current pin gear is disassembled (after we’re done paint prepping with the “rotisserie” function of that pivot pin).

If anyone wants to debate how to secure that cup inside the mast, send your thoughts!

Thanks

It was easy to fill in all the old holes on the mast from the prior installation of the Tides Marine sail track. But we knew there would be pain ahead when the beefed up mast was ready. Ugh, it’s been five hours so far to drill and tap about 100 bolt holes.

The green tape is the same one you saw two weeks ago, marked with the old holes so we could ensure the new ones are far enough away.

We tried putting the threading tap in a low speed power drill, but the machine’s torque broke the bit – seems you really need that touch of doing it by hand. 70 more to go, a couple minutes each… No TV tonight :)