Roberts 53 Mast

A customer came to us with a steel boat which was essentially a shell and a former Nicholson 55 mast which had been crudely sawn in half.

The first task was to rejoin the cut which would require us to make a 6ft long sleeve inside the mast and rivet it together after having made good the cut line.

Next was the issue of spreaders; the previous boat was a good deal narrower than this one so we would need at least one new pair or longer spreaders. As it transpired the old lower spreaders were about the right length for the new top spreaders. As the mast manufacturer has been out of business for many years we were not able to find any new lower spreaders, as a result we had to adapt some Selden ones using original spreader root and Polyester resin.

We also needed to engineer a new mast step, with help from Hercules CSMD we came up with a stainless steel shoe for mast to stand in with lashing holes for blocks and halyard stowage.

The final thing to be done was new standing and running rigging, we went for dynamic plus halyards (half dyneema, half polyester) and 10mm stainless steel rigging as per the original plans. We needed to calculate the athwart-ships lengths and then we were ready to step.