Mast Sleeve

After another couple of weeks of break I finally had a free Saturday to dedicate myself to this project! So a few things have happened over the past week. Firstly I ordered laminate sails and a spinnaker from iSails http://www.enUS.i-sails.com/oursailspaperjet.htm After a very important consult with my better half we decided to with the both the red trimmed sails and also the red spinnaker. I also ordered the majority of the boat hardware from Mauri Pro Sailing. Amazingly enough only one part was discontinued and I was able to find a replacement part from Ronstan. I was going to order the sheets/lines etc but decided to hang tight for a little bit until I think through some form of a color scheme.

Now back to the construction! First step was to figure out a good way to get both pieces perfectly straight and level while proving a means to still allow me to wrap the fiberglass around the spigots to make the sleeve. My solution was to use my work bench as the level surface and then to cut up some MDF slats to elevate both the mast and the top mast from the workbench surface. This assured that at least in the plane of the sail track everything was perfectly straight. This was followed by copious amounts of checking the alignments of both masts. I did this both using my 6' level, a laser level and also the old trusty naked eye approach by sighting down the mast!

Top Mast / Bottom Mast lined up

Once I was satisfied that everything was where it should be I started the process by making sure that both spigots aligned perfectly with each other and where the same shape/dimensions.

Spigots cleaned up and ready for taping

After some sanding to make sure the everything lined up perfectly and also one last double check with the level I wrapped a couple of layers of wax paper around the spigots along with some blue masking tape at the corners to make sure that things did not stick.

Ready for fiberglassing

Next step was to cut the fiberglass and wet it out. I had been trying to figure out the best way to do this without having the edges of the fiberglass unravel as I wetted things out. My solution was to wet it out on Seran Wrap which did the trick!

The bad news is that even though the wetting out process worked perfectly I still had issues with the edges of the fiberglass sheets unravelling once I started wrapping the fiberglass around the spigots. To be frank I have no idea of what I could have done differently to prevent this from happening. The interesting thing was that it took a total of 8 wraps of fiberglass to make up the 2mm thickness of the spigots! I was reading someone else's building blog and they mentioned that they used only two wraps. Not sure if that was a typo or not!

Once it set up I followed up with 3 coats of epoxy to fill in the weave.

Tomorrow I will see how this whole thing comes apart and see what challenges I will be presented with trying to do this! After I get it off the next step will be to do some sanding on the sleeve to take out the high points at both ends along with the numerous drips I encountered at the bottom of the sleeve!

Next steps will be to permanently attach the sleeve to the lower mast and to start the sail track installation. Once that is complete it will be time to start the final finish of the spars!