Anonymous wrote: Thank you Nils, That is very encouraging. I will have a look at your photos and see if I can come up with a solution. My first thoughts were a sleeve inside the mast and a taberacle, so to raise the mast I would use an A frame (which I already have) like you use your 2m pole, rise it up on the tabernacle hinge then the insert will drop down through the deck into a clamp mounted down on the keel. The insert would probably need to be at least 2-3 metres up inside the mast.
Regards
Andrew
Nils, I've looked at the photos - very impressive! Please can you tell me, when you are lowering the mast, how do you lift it up to the height of the hinge?
Regards
Andrew
Hello Andrew, and also Bill,
Yes, I suppose you can find a solution the way you describe. Just a practical hint: I use 4 bushings (bearings) of a plastic material called POM to ensure low friction and at the same time a narrow clearance fit between the sleeve and the mast sections. The two lower bushings line the sleeve up tightly to the lower mast section, while the two upper bushings line the upper mast section tightly up to the sleeve. Thereby there is no tangible slack (play) in the mast when it's upright. In the first version I used bushings in aluminium. However, aluminium seizes so badly on aluminium, that I hardly got the sleeve off again. I tried with copper paste on the contact surfaces, and that helped, but that brown stuff makes a real mess, and I therefore changed to bushings in POM as suggested by the guys at the mechanical workshop. So if the mast and your insert are in aluminium, there should be a different material in between them where they contact.
About how I lift before the lowering: Yes, as Bill comments, it is only the sleeve I need to lift. The sleeve weighs about 16 kg, and most times I have simply lifted it without any lifting aid, but with the added friction this has been on the limit of what I have been able to lift above shoulder height. That isn't good for the blood pressure for a guy of my age, so for example last Friday when I lowered the mast, I unshackled the halyard block from the yard, attached it to the handle I have at the sleeve's lower end and used this 4:1 purchase halyard tackle to lift the sleeve.
Off topic: I uploaded a picture of the mast after it was lowered. It was during the lunar eclipse with the Moon approximately in the South, which means close to spring tide, so even with the mast down I had to wait a few hours for clearance under bridges, so I went to sleep on board. A beautiful night on the fjord!
Regards
Nils