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In the summer of 2003, my mom noticed one of the spreaders was broken after putting the boat in the water (with the mast down). I wanted to fix it cheaply, so I just decided I would go out and find some 1" aluminum conduit, cut it to size, take the tip off of the old one and attach it to the new one. Well, I looked everywhere in my hometown of McMinnville, Oregon and couldn't find any aluminum that size - it was usually 3/4" at the largest. I came closest at a hardware store on the coast that had 7/8". I really wanted to go sailing so I broke down and used steel conduit instead. Since the interior diameter of the conduit wasn't the same as the aluminum, I had to forego the spreader tips and just tape the spreaders to the shrouds. It worked, but then I noticed just a year later that they'd started to rust (see picture below) and I was also worried about galvanic corrosion between the spreaders and the mast. I tried looking around again, and got a couple of leads from West Marine, but then I called Bluewater Yachts and they had spreaders cut to length with holes drilled and all I had to do was slap them on so that's what I did. |
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