No- I saw your email regarding mast compression. I'd leave the post in; a masthead rig has more compression than a fractional. On the Sage we use 1" of balsa on the cabin top and 1/2" down the sides fwd of the window abd obn the side decks, with three layers of carbon on each side of the balsa. I haven't had my Sage in more than about 20 knots of wind but can't see any flex at all, and I think it's stiff enough to drive a truck over. It would be pretty hard to retrofit a similar sandwich unless you turned the boat upside down! jerry ----- Original Message ----- From: Thomas Buzzi To: jerry montgomery Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2014 5:21 PM Subject: Mast loading on an M17 Hi Jerry, My emails don't seem to be getting to the site, for some reason. So I will ask you, if you think a beam of some sort running below the headliner and attached at the chairplates would take the compression load of the M17 mast? Then I could do away with the compression post on the v-berth and have a "Sage" type v-berth. Regards, Tom B -- I am using the free version of SPAMfighter. SPAMfighter has removed 10286 of my spam emails to date. Get the free SPAMfighter here: http://www.spamfighter.com/len Do you have a slow PC? Try a Free scan http://www.spamfighter.com/SLOW-PCfighter?cid=sigen