masts and rigging for the real world...

Sadly these days a lot of things cost silly money and more than their share has the word "marine" attached!

For those of us firmly in the cheap seats, there are a lot of ways to bring costs down but I'm always surprised at just how expensive some stuff can be...

Take masts and rigging for instance! Seriously silly prices get thrown around for what is really just aluminum tubes and wire. Now in the cheap seats of course we know that we NEVER buy industrial stuff (like wire) from a purveyor of marine goods. Buying it from Acme wire who may not know a boat from a hole in the wall but certainly DO KNOW wire, is even more important because they are not in the world of silly marine pricing. They sell wire and other rigging stuff for what it's worth not what they can gouge which is often a huge difference!

The same line of thinking goes for chainplates and suchlike... Now that just about every city has some sort of CNC metal cutting operation you can make a drawing give it to a guy and have a perfectly cut and polished chainplate for just a little more than the cost of the metal value. I won't even mention the obscene pricing the last time I looked at chainplates from a marine store...

Masts, being low volume products with seriously high tooling costs are pretty silly price wise but you have to wonder how various mast builders always seem to have brand name masts with maybe a little scratch or cosmetic blemish in the anodizing for 10% of the retail price. Of course with masts being just hollow tubes there are all sorts of alternatives to marine industry spars... I've known more folks who built boats and wound up with light poles and suchlike that worked out just fine at a fraction of what it would cost to buy something from Francespar or the like.

Dudley Dix and CKD boats are even doing mast kits in... (Dare I say it?) ... Wood!

It might suprise a lot of folks but wood works real well for masts and in these days of epoxy and other evil chemicals, no longer falls prey to 99% of all the negative press... Check it out!