Converting old windsurfer mast to a long oar ?

[lw395]

Thanks for the tip off. I didn't know the bottom halves were breaking. Seen plenty of the old aluminium tops fold!

How/ where do they usually fail, at the gooseneck or at deck height?

Personally I only get involved with Lasers at the club level, so I mostly see old bottom sections failing around the kicker tang, I think dissimilar metal corrosion plays a part.
One nearly hit me last season.
But one of the top guys I was talking to told me he'd broken 3 top sections last year and one bottom section this year, which he viewed as an improvement.

 

[Iain C]

There is NOTHING WRONG with using carbon fibre on boats. The properties of the finished carbon fibre product vary enormously depending on the resin used, the gsm count of the weave, the pattern and orientation of the weave, the layers/layup, the consolidation, the UV surface coating, and many other factors. Whilst I appreciate that some carbon may be very "shattery" and your old average windsurfer mast is a long splinter dispenser, I've worked with carbon a lot and I've never had a significant failure.

I heavily modified a Cherub dinghy using a lot of reclaimed CF tube, a cedar cored CF rudder, home made mast, home made spreaders and a mast that was actually modified from an RS600 mast that had spent 5 years in the bottom of a lake. I never had a significant failure.

I've also built two CF bowsprits, one for my Sabre, one for my Bav32, both documented on here, out of heavily modified bits of broken 18' skiff masts, and they work perfectly, even with fairly significant point loadings.