The ring at the stub base is more of a shoulder/flange...all the same material...either machined or forged as one.

The early T's (that were the boats "selected" for the games did have a hinge system. Marstroms dispensed with it...even on the earlier alu mast. The trick to raising/lowering the stick is to keep downward pressure on the foot as another person walks it up/down. I stand at teh beam, put one hand onto the mast foot and lean heavily on it. Other hand holds a trapeze handle and exerts as much force as possible forward. Critical angle is about 45 degrees...then the weight starts to shift down onto the foot more and stub engages better with the cup.

Robbie Daniel showed me a neat technique...with the mast positioned to raise, stand on the front beam with one foot on the mast foot while holding a traphandle. Start leaning forward, putting wieght on the foot and on the trap. The other person acts to guide, start the list...but the work is done by the human gin pole effect. Trick is to keep the mast from rotating under your foot, which can cause you to slip off the mast foot, creating a dangerous spar fall. Lowering the mast is the reverse of this procedure. Brillant when/if it works.

One thing to consider for your application...since there is no captive mast foot, you cannot use things like shroud extenders/hyfield levers etc to assist in boat righting after capsize. Also depending on how much flex your design has, you might need to look at a different base setup...excessive flex might slacked the rig enough to cause an unstepping situation.

In all the years of Tboats I have, have never heard of these mast feet failing...and they do run higher rig/mainsheet loads than the usual 20 beach cat. Some of the older cast alloy designs have reported to crack...after 20+ years and perhaps with owners running more modern rig settings/tensions on older boats.

Within a year of the carbon mast introduction. Marstrom notified owners that the base of the mast where the foot inserts into was developing cracks...due to the higher than spec'd main downhaul purchases (8:1 vs 16:1) being used by lots of teams. Since the downhaul acts against the foot, forcing it into the spar base at very high loads, the spar end was failing. The fix was to wrap a layer or two of carbon tape around the lower edge to reinforce the area. You can see this wrap in some of my photos. I likely used way more width on this tape than was needed...but it was my first ever carbon work.

If your spar is a recent build, I suspect it has likely got more layers there already.