To those who asked

[sailaway78]

Will do cup

Will do cup. When I tune the rig, am going to try to get a little bit of a bow in the mast, mostly to help flatten a main sail that is getting a little bit stretched and has a little more draft than I want. But other than that, will be no difference, with the exception of the whole rig being 1/4" shorter. The location of the step is as close as I could get it to the origional location. And I measured pretty carefully.

 

[SamLust]

On mast steps, fiberglass and luck

As I remember, Nice & Easy's boat is a Seidleman. Siedleman was very small. As best I can tell his efficiencies were based on tagging his material orders on to Hunter's orders back in the "New Jersey" days. He certainly didn't have the time, money or staff to do extensive testing , certainly not of basic things like mast steps. He and John Cherubini simply "knew" what would work. Most of the time they were right. Sometimes not so right. Things happen, we get to repair them.

Mast/Rig geometry? A set of compromises at best. The designer choses his preference or abides by the preference and/or the dictates of his customer. There is a long and respected history of changing rigs from original. Joshua Slocum completely changed Spray's rig and appears to have been quite happy with it. I moved the headstay on my Hunter 33 (C) forward about 18" with no ill effects. It allows me to carry a wee bit more sail in a wee bit more wind before having to reef. My choice, not a big deal.

Pressure Treated? Here is where I veer off from agreement. All of the pressure treated I.ve seenis Southern Yellow Pine, a soft wood at best. My concern there would be eventual compression of the wood itself, even with a sheathing of fiberglass. My choice would be plastic deck bulding material material. It seems near impossible to compress and I can't see how it could rot in a salt water bath. I have to do a repair like this on one of my boats and that's the material I plan to use.

 

[LANCE ON CLOUD NINE]

It is hard to remember that all boats used to be custom.

No two exactly alike, with lots of tweaking and last minute design changes during the build. Just think about some of our nations earliest fine quality, great performing sailing vessels built on the east coast- It is hard to imagine now, that the first step was probably to put on a pot of coffee on a wood stove in a barn and then to walk out into the woods with an ax to drop a tree for the keel! Man have we got it easy now!

 

[sailaway78]

A little confusion

There seems to be a little confusion about how I did this, and the effects. The origional mast step was good, and was re-used. The 2 x 10's, were used as a spacer under the step. The mast itself sits on the step, not on the wood spacer. The mast step does sit on top of the wooden spacer, but this step is pretty large, approx. 6 x 8 or so, and is large enough that I don't think compression should be a problem. And there is no change in any of the specs of the rig, except the entire thing sits approx. 1/4" lower.