For all of you that have been wondering what the fate of Mothball 1 was, well here she is, fully repaired and sporting new tramps. The repair of Mothball 1 was actually fairly easy. After cutting out all of the crushed plywood I just made some new plywood backing plates and epoxied them in place, then re-attached the mast stump and cut more plywood to fill in the gap. To make sure it never fails there again I reinforced the whole area with carbon and then added a forward facing compression strut (as suggested by Phil) to take the forward loading from the mast. When I was designing the boat I never really imagined the amount of forward pressure at the mast stump from the vang so I'm not really surprised that it failed there. All in all I’m pretty happy with the repair. I took the boat out to do a shakedown cruise yesterday and everything worked well. Now I need to do a few extra mods and repairs that I forgot about from last summer and I should be ready for the season. Maybe my next project should be a new dolly?
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