Thank you very much John Pierce,
Finally somebody who is willing to go on record with this !
You've provided some very interesting info. I wonder if we can get some of the other carbon mast builders like Fibrefoam and Saarberg to contribute to this discussion in public.
You say that stiffness is not an issue since you can adust the cross sectional profile, and you are right, however to do this you need to build a new mould every time, this is not a practical suggestion.
Naturally I was commenting on the engineering side of the topic. Here stiffness is not a big limiting issue. I was not suggesting that customized stiffness distribution was to be implemented by using different crosssections. Basically what I was saying that a crossection can be chosen as to satisfy the most flexible mast bending requirement where the mast walls are solid enough to handle the loads and (off the water) abuse. From then onwards the customizing can be done by adding cloth were needed (making the mast more robust simultaniously). In effect the first case determines the mould and with this mould all customized masts can be build.
I write this in clearification of my comments earlier to other forum readers. Naturally you and I were on the same page already.
Again thanks alot for providing us with some hard data.
Wouter
