During the life of the class the MSCA has continued to work closely with the builder, Ovington Boats and their key suppliers of critical components to ensure the class continues to be the best it can and to revise any items that may suffer excessive wear, tear and breakage.

All this whilst at the same time ensuring the strict manufactures one-design principals are preserved ensuring a fair and level playing field for all competitors. Over the years a number of minor performance neutral changes have been made and these are documented in the Product Evolution Guide.

There have been a number of issues reported to the committee over the years and these are dealt with below.

Mast Head Crane

There has been a small number of reported issues with the head crane pulling out/rotating causing a split in the mast tube at the tip.

The S2/S3 Carbon head crane design was upgraded some 8 months ago. The motive for this was to improve on the current design which had a tendency on occasion to fracture the mast tip. So by lengthening the spigot and reducing the leverage effect of the crane itself we believe this new design to be a major improvement of the previous.

For a series of images featuring the new crane that shows how to rig a 2:1 halyard, see here. (PDF of S3-Carbon-Head-Crane)

This modification has already been filtering into production of the latest masts.

Mast Track

There have been a number of reports that the plastic mast track has fractured at the point where the batten pockets impact against the track. We have sought to resolve any future problems and put in place a solution for any who have the problem in the future. There is also quite a bit on the forum about this here. 

The original Series 4 track was robust but was always too large across the flange to fit the Series 3 section and had to be replaced with a dedicated design track. The Series 3 track we (Selden) believe became available in 2003 and was produced via a new supplier. Several years later Selden terminated the relationship with this supplier. A new supplier started to produce using a new die and to the Selden specification.

Selden’s supplier has modified his tooling to ensure that the extruded polymer will always have web walls nearer to the thicker end of the Selden drawing tolerances. We believe this will provide us with a product that’s less susceptible to web distortion coupled with thicker web walls will hence be generally tougher. The specification of the plastic used will also be adjusted to make the track less brittle.

Selden will also be making “repair kits” of spare track and the appropriate adhesive available to Ovington Boats (Northern Hemisphere) and the AUS dealer (Southern hemisphere). These kits will be available free of charge to any owners who may have a breakage of mast track. (* – Please see note at the end of this class archived class update)

Mast Tip Breakages

There had been a number of reports that there had been an excessive amount of mast tip breakage and there was a concern that there may be a problem. Upon further investigation it has been established that the level of mast breakage is less than 1.5% of the fleet per year and this is well below the failure rate of typical performance dinghies.

In addition when we pushed into the details of those breakages it was established that in most cases the boat had been inverted in shallow water and the mast had hit the bottom of the seabed and that had caused the failure. No dinghy mast will sustain being dug into the seabed.

That said we are seeking solutions to make the class even better and cheaper to sail so two suggestions have been tabled:

1. Toughen the top mast – so adding more safety factor.

Selden believe this can be achieved by changing the bend characteristics minimally

Plus side – potentially have fewer breakages due to capsizing or general miss-use.
Down side – slight weight, slight change to the bend and addition cost

The MSCA International committee has moved against this as it would create two “types” of mast within the fleet which would be undesirable and this overrides the benefits to a minority.

2. Make the top join a dry join – currently the MUSTO Skiff mast is manufactured in 3 parts (2 joins).

The bottom join by the spreaders is a dry join and the owner may separate the mast at this point. Currently the top join is glued. If this join is also a dry join it would make it easier and cheaper to replace just the tip section should this get damaged.

The intention is for Selden to produce a prototype mast that will be fully tested. If this test is successful then the MSCA International committee will be supportive of this change and will put it to member vote in October via the on-line survey.

The MSCA would like to thank Ovington Boats and Selden for their attention on these matters and the resulting continued minor improvements to the specification to keep the fleet sailing low cost robust performance dinghies.

For the latest updated see here (links to update posted in 2016).

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* Content updated: This class update is part of the archived posts for the summary section of the ‘Product Evolution’ page. Free Mast Track repair kits were only made available at the time of this class update being published (in 2015) as part of the mast requirements at the time. This class update is for informational purposes only.