Acquiring a mainmast

The first mast I found for the Glory B was a wooden spar from a 1926 schooner called the "Monsoon", which was broken up in San Leandro after the owner didn't bother to do any repair to her. The mast appeared to be restorable when I first saw it...

The deal I made required me to also take away the foremast, which was rotted away and worthless, and I also got the roller-furling boom, which - while the seams were splitting - also seemed to be repairable. 

Once I got the mast back to the yard, though, I found that it was in much worse state than it at first appeared. Once I removed the mast hardware I found that the seam under the sail track was opened up the whole length of the mast. Rain water from its years sitting on the ground in a San Leandro welding yard had caused rot throughout the length, and the mast was not worth repair.

So, back to the Internet I went looking for another alternative. An ad asking about a mast got a response, and I went up to Petaluma to take a look at a 53' aluminum mast that was available. What I found at first didn't look too promising -

However, on a closer examination and some wading through the reeds, I found that the spar was actually in pretty good shape. There was a 'slight' bow in the mast, but it was right at the spreader points, meaning it could easily be tuned out with the stays.

So, here we go towing the mast from Petaluma back to Berkeley behind my son's pickup. with the masthead over the truck bed and the bottom riding in a dolly we kept under the legal length limit - although we got some funny looks :-)

Here's the boom back in the yard in Berkeley and sitting up on some stands for a better examination. As you can see, the bowing is almost unnoticeable.

The mast is powder coated black, but the coating was in pretty bad shape. I decided to take it off, use an aluminum primer to re-etch the surface, and paint it white.

First, though, I decided to cover over all the areas where hardware had been removed with doubling plates rather than just fill the holes. Since the rig I'm going with will be a single-spreader system, I covered the holes where the upper tangs had been fitted. This might appear 'overkill', but since  I had to remove 3' of the mast anyway for length, I had the aluminum stock on-hand to use. This picture shows one of the plates bedded and installed.

Here we are etched and primed..

Then three coats of polyurethane topsides white gloss, and the mast looks ready to step.