Originally Posted by macca
Originally Posted by Matt M

Aluminum is soft and damages easily
Matt


I think an alloy mast on a beach cat will always outlast the competitive lifespan of the platform, this damage you speak of would also apply to a carbon mast, if you abuse something then its gets damaged no matter what the material. A suitable treated alloy mast will last as long as a carbon mast at a mere fraction of the outlay both for the builder and owner. I haven't noted any great number of broken alloy masts in the class that would justify going to carbon, so again it seems to just increase costs and as you have stated yet again, there is no performance gain... (I sure as hell would like to take 4kg off the tip of my rig!)

How about you factor in the cost of all the tooling to build a carbon mast including moulds and oven long enough etc?


Macca,

No argument on the life cycle at all. The aluminum masts are very good and have a very large wind range window. The sail generates the power and with the exception of the Stealth having a different section shape the other carbon masts out there are all a nearly identical profile to the superwing aluminum one. In our working with carbon, besides changing the cut to match the mast, getting a mast with a full range has been an issue.

The aluminum masts are very easily scratched and dented in handling and shipping. They are not repairable and it makes for a lot of scrap extrusions as it may be cosmetic but you cannot sell a new boat with a bunch of scratches and or small dings. The carbon masts we have sourced are significantly more robust, and carbon is repairable in the worse case.

Again this is a philosophical debate of banning or not. You seem to propose as it is more expensive, it should be banned. The class premise is that if it does make a material difference, cost or not, why ban it? Carbon has an “exotic” reputation as expensive aerospace grade materials. With the expense to performance gain argument we could ban many things to make the boats less costly. Epoxy is 2 times more expensive than a good vinylester resin, but in practice it is nearly impossible to discern differences between the 2 in production parts. Daryls example of going back to the 70’s grade hardware is also applicable. A block is a block but we spend a lot more on the new Carbo and Orbit series stuff than using the still available GP series stuff, for what gain? We could ban all new models, because designing and tooling up a new boat is expensive and that cost has to be recovered by the builders somehow. The list is endless and it is a bit of a witch hunt to be on the war path against carbon (or any particular material for that matter) in my opinion.



In my garage if I wanted to build a 1 off mast, I could tool up and do this for very little money. We build temporary ovens and 1 off molds (there are a variety of low temp cure epoxies) for projects all the time. A small amount of wood, screws, bondo and a lot of elbow grease and it can be accomplished for very little to no money. Scrap water pipe from a construction site down the street was used just recently to build a quick oven for some hydrofoils. I have used temporary tents made from wood and visqueen to cure carbon epoxy parts as large as 135 foot. If I am building these in my shop on a production basis, I would spend a bit more money to get a real tool and I have to count my labor hours. We have looked at it and it is almost the same cost to get a production mold as a new die made at an extruder for aluminum. A more permanent oven is still pretty inexpensive. Marstrom, Bim and Hall are the only ones making autoclave masts. Fiberfoam, the most popular A class mast, as well as a lot of others are just bagged laminates. Once an extruder sets up his run, they have almost no labor per mast. This is more of a factor in the cost difference than the raw material price and the reason carbon masts will always be expensive. No real reason to ban it though.

Sorry for the Wouter length post. blush