Repairing Impact Damage to a Glass Fibre Mast

|Peter Johnson
Repairing impact damage to a glass fibre mast

What happened

Our main mast was hit by a car that lost control nearby. Fortunately no one was hurt, though the car came off far worse than the mast — we were left with some marking and damage to investigate.

Assessing the damage

The mast had already been undercoated, so we couldn't see what damage had been done underneath. We stripped the paint back around the impact points and found that some of the glass fibre laminate underneath had been damaged.

The repair: adding another layer of glass

We decided to lay another layer of glass fibre cloth over the affected area. It's belt-and-braces, and probably more than strictly necessary, but it's far better to over-engineer a repair now than have it fail later at sea.

We used glass fibre cloth for the repair, wet out with epoxy resin in the usual way, then faired back to blend with the surrounding paintwork before recoating.
Peter Johnson

Written by

Peter Johnson

Pete Johnson is the owner of Epoxy Ltd, trading since the late 1990s and supplying MAS epoxy and boatbuilding materials to professional and DIY builders alike, all under the philosophy of "Simple Perfection". When he's not helping customers, he's usually elbow-deep in one of his own projects, from building the 38ft schooner Iracunda from scratch to restoring boats like Junior, a 1950s Yachting Monthly dinghy rescued from the scrap heap. He writes the workshop blog to share the practical, often hard-won lessons learned building and repairing boats with epoxy.