I am interested in learning more about beach cat carbon fiber masts and their construction. The resent failure of an ACat mast vs. the I20s where I have never heard of a mast failure makes me think that they can be constructed with greatly different factors of safety.

It seems (I have not looked at the math) that the primary loading is going to be a compression load down the length of the mast. Does this mean they use primarily unidirectional cloth oriented vertically? This seems to have the added benefit of allowing the mast to bend more to flatten the sail. There are bending loads so there probably has to be some unidirectional or bidirectional fiber oriented in the horizontal direction.

Has anyone ever seen a lay-up schedule for a mast or looked at a failed mast and seen how many layers of cloth was laid up and/or how they were oriented?

Are carbon masts are much stiffer than aluminum masts? If so, how does this affect de-powering?

An idea of the differences in Sail design between carbon and Aluminum masted boats?