Your use of an AC boat mast is a poor example, pay any engineering company enough money and you can get a pretty reliably consistant result in most production methods from being willing to sacrifice any unit not in specified tolerances.
With the AC boat masts my guess is they made 10 or so masts and hand picked the two most similar, probably trashed the rest so that other teams wouldn't be able use them.
To get consistant results within tight tolerances from a budget production method ( marstrom for example ) one would have to over engineer the product so much to over compensate layup differences ( after all humans did design the engineering process )that the end result would look similar mast to mast but not the lightest nor cheapest
Wayne, Whilst there is a lot of money spend by AC teams, I can assure you that they don't apply the "lets make a dozen masts and see which one we like" method!!! An AC mast costs close to 1million Dollars!!! If they spent money on a dozen masts how would they do the important things like pay crew salaries? <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
Wouter: I see no point arguing with you anymore, your point of view is based totally on theory, mine on experience. You will always pull some abstract example to support your point of view and whilst that may make you feel better, it just doesn't have anything to do with what actually happens.
The fact that you can convince people like Wayne that the only way to get two identical masts is to build a big batch of them (costing a minimum of $10 million) and pick the good ones is to say the least, disturbing...
