Commander #155 'Mephisto Cat'

[Rico]

The dissasembly of the mast was one of the most daunting projects... But looking back, it was not too bad...

Painting / Sailtrack

The etching / priming / process semmed complicated as it was my first time doing it... And the instructions are not as clear as they could be...

I did scratch my head at the prospect of pulling the sailtrack off, but looking at the state of the old (presumably original) aluminum rivets made the decision easier. Taking the track off made the painting process MUCH easier too looking back on it.

I described the painting process above briefly, but in summary, it goes something like this:
1.- Clean mast to bare aluminum
2.- Apply etching primer (diluted)
3.- Let dry for more than an hour, but under no circumstances more than 24 hrs. Failing to adhere to this requires going back to step 1. I never found out why... maybe the mast will turn into a pumkin... (?)
4.- Apply 1st coat of Primer, let dry.
5.- Sand & clean & apply second coat of Primer.
6.- Let dry for 24 hrs.
7.- Apply 2-part perfection. Do not forget to paint spreaders, boom, or new aluminum mast base (Check!). I should have also painted the propeller. I forgot that.
Now it is red...
8.- Stop applying paint and leave the area altogether... lest you screw-up your beautiful work.

#8 is likely the most important step. I managed to comply with it and only managed to forget to paint the propeller... Not too bad.

The materials I used are pictured.


The sailtrack attachment.

This was a bit tricky. The hardest part is to determine which darn rivets to use...
-I decided to go with SS rivets. Alternate arrangements on other A-Cs are Aluminum rivets (what I had originally), and SS sheetmetal Screws). But picking a material and type of fastener was the easy part...

The hard part is that Rivets are not very flexible in terms of suitability of use. Their grip range and allowable hole diameter is limited to each size, so for proper fastening, JUST the right size rivet has to be used. AND unfortunately, no one seems to have a trial kit so that you can do a bit of testing /looking/feeling.

I was lucky to find:

a) A supplier that had a good supply of rivets in terms of Materials, size & selection (Diameters, head sizes, grip range, etc.) (mandrel material is also an issue as you can have a mess if you get SS Rivets with a plain steel mandrel, for example...)
b) A supplier that let me grab a couple of each of the potential correct sizes and did not require me to buy a minimum of 100 of each (as seems commom practice).

I believe that the total number of fasteners on the mast (for the sailtrack) was close to 105 each. Buy at least a handful of extra rivets...

I had to account for the thickness of the mast wall, the vinyl isolating material, and the sailtrack. The mast is Aluminum, the sail track is SS... I went with SS Rivets because of the durability and fastening strenght... If the Aluminum rivets held fine even in their old age and corroded state. (some of my original rivets were at the point where most of the head had corroded off!... )

The key is to isolate these materials. I used a nice thick coat of paint and a vinyl material on top of that to isolate the sail track from the mast, and then I used the same coat of paint and a nice glob of Lanocote to isolate the rivets from the surrounding material as well as the sailtrack itself...

Pictured are the rivets I ended up using. I used a hand riveter. (Yes my hands were quite tired!) I am very happy with the instalation. The sailtrack is quite solidly attached.