On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 10:44:59 +0000, Renato Testa
wrote:
i'm new to this group, so first of all "hello everybody".

I'm the owner off a Show 38 sailyacht which lays in the mediterranean sea,
exactly in sardegna.

This boat is a pretty good sailboat with a good displacement but not the
boat to live on it and not the one to cross the oceans.
So i'm planning to build a sailboat by my own in the near future, i'm a bit
experienced in working with my hands.

One point that i have seen are lattice masts. I'm very excited about this
concept and would like to know some more about this kind of masts. Can
somebody point me to some (more) infos about lattice masts for boats. I
wasn't very successfull with google, plenty of links for antenna masts and
stuff like that, but not much about boats.

Thanks very much for any hints.
=====================================

There was a 40 foot racing sloop on Long Island Sound named
"Barrister" that made 2 or 3 attempts at a lattice mast back in the
late 1980s. They were dismasted within a short time after every
attempt and eventually went back to a conventional spar. If I had to
guess at the cause of failure it would probably be a lack of torsional
stiffness. The best of the lightweight, hi tech masts nowadays are
carbon fiber cured in an autoclave.