Cat Building in Bali Indonesia

Your undertaking is quite large for limited resources. An alternative to bamboo is a strip laminate mast. It would be heavy but much stronger than the bamboo. Since Indonesia has some of the best hardwood resources in the world it could be made for next to nothing. Plus it would be much easier to attach the mast to the cross beam what ever it is made of.

Good luck sailing in paradise.

Thnx, what i really need to know is WHAT to use to connect the mast to the crossbar. The crossbar will be wood. I do have options for fiberglass boats later. But the actual mast/crossbar connection/pivot/luckyspecialmagicwhatever/ eludes me. Any pictures of a step by step available anywhere for download

I'm just guessing that since you're confessing inexperience and might be using bamboo for a mast (beware, it can give little warning of compression failure BTDT, unlike side loads where it will creak and split before failing, generally) I am guessing that your mast won't be rotating... you can make a cup shaped socket for the foot of the mast to drop into. You would want to carve a

plug

for the bottom of the bamboo that will sit in this cup. The plug should fit the bamboo snugly on the inside hollow of the bamboo and have a rim or ledge for the end of the bamboo to mate with all the way around. This way, when the bottom of the mast starts flexing and gyrating, the compression loads aren't transferred to just one point on the bottom of the cut bamboo.

You want to cut the piece of bamboo about 1.5

-2

below a

node

and put the plug in with some glue to hold it in. This plug should have a rounded bottom tht drops into the cup shaped device that stops the mast foot from sliding out from under it all.

The local boats that use bamboo masts mostly use rigs similar to a sunfish (lateen rig?) with an upper sprit and a long boom. Some of them will fly the sprit vertically against the mast (gunter rig?) but the common element is the long boom that rises almost to be equal with the top of the sail. Quite odd: the leech is almost horizontal and the foot rises with the clew way up in the air. Their booms are usually quite thin and tapered which lets the sail spill air by opening up the leech so that they don't destroy their rigs. Needless to say, sailshape is akin to a brassiere, with little thought of flattening or shape control.

I have had a few bamboo masted experiences, and they've been fun above all else, and cheap too. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the sprit is used to lace the luff of the sail to since there's no practical way of using a track or even loops of rope on a bamboo mast with all the knots and nodes. The sail may go up but it won't want to come down! (viagra rig?) Do try to keep the mast in column, or you could have a surprise... 😉 It also allows mast height to be lessened and gives you a

comp tip

of sorts.

Best of luck and keep us posted...

little pat