I know, it seems to make sense. I was going to radius my mast, but I wanted to get the curve right, so I made some drawings and did some geometry and trigmo...trignomino...numbers and there wasn't any curve. Then I did a bunch more drawings till I saw how it worked. You're not stretching the shrouds or anything when you raise the mast. But if you radius it, the shrouds are _undertensioned_ until the last moment when it rocks onto the high spot. The tradeoff for that is significant reduction in the footprint of the mast, i.e. higher pressure. If you take the radius too far it might change the way the mast responds to the backstay adjuster, but I haven't worked that out. On Mar 23, 2018, 12:08 PM -0700, Mike Barnett <claritysailingadventures@yahoo.com>, wrote:
My eyeballing shows about 3/4" of interference without the mast heel being radiused. My mast step has a vertical slot for the retaining bolt, but no horizontal slot at the bottom, like I've seen on some other boats (not specifically M-17's). I've radiused masts before, and haven't had any issues, so I'm comfortable with maintaining rig integrity (I start the radiusing about 1/4" behind the retaining bolt which keeps the compression load over the bolt the same as before, and usually use the for and aft measurement of the mast cross section as the radius for the curve.