Those hundred thousand dollar mast-erpieces (see what we did there?) are made with sticky tape, plastic bags, a big oven and a Stanley knife. So you could make your own!

If you really; really wanted to!

Have you ever wondered how those enormous carbon fibre masts found on boats like Wild Oats XI and Comanche are built? This video rides along with the team from Hall Spars and Rigging as they construct a cruising mast from scratch, and you might be surprised to see what they use to do it!

Starting from the cheapest item on the list, sticky tape is used to pressurize each layer of pre-preg carbon fibre as it's laid onto the male mould, built from aluminium. There is quite literally a tape dispenser on a track, that runs down the length of the mast as it's rotated!

Then, there's the giant plastic bag that gets sucked onto the mast, to further apply pressure to the whole thing. Without the bag, air might be trapped within the layers of carbon, causing weak points and possibly failure at sea!

Don't forget the copius amounts of Stanley knife blades to cut excess carbon cloth, so they fit perfectly together. You wouldn't want a TP52 mast with wrinkles would you?

To cook it all up, the mast slides into a giant pressure cooker, called an autoclave. Now making one of these suckers in your backyard would be quite the take (although, not impossible!) It applies even more pressure (in addition to the vacuum bag!) to the structure, squeezing every last molecule of air out of the carbon, while heating it to temperatures well over 100 degrees C. This activates the resin, which is infused into the carbon cloth in a dry state to make handling easier, and fast-tracks the curing process.

Once that's done, the male mould is removed and the technical work begins. Halyards are run, fittings attached and of course, every carbon mast gets a coat of paint to keep the UV out!

Check out how carbon fibre yacht masts are made in the video below.

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