Installing the Carbon Fibre Martingale
The first thing you see in this video is the finished martingale in place. Then it cuts to Shayne drilling straight through the carbon front beam we’d built from America’s Cup mast sections. If you know what that beam is made of and what it cost in time and material to build, you feel that moment.
This is not a job for guesswork. The slot position, the angle, the size — all of it was modelled in Solid Edge before anything was cut, because no original plans exist for this era of Catana and you do not eyeball a penetration through a structural carbon beam. When the CAD said it was right, Shayne cut it. The dry fit confirmed everything lined up, and the strap went in for the last time.
The adhesive for the secondary bond was SpaBond 445 — a rubber-toughened epoxy. Standard epoxy for a joint like this isn’t ideal because it’s brittle. The martingale sees dynamic loads, not just static ones, and a brittle glue joint can crack under that kind of cycling. SpaBond stays rubbery after cure, impact resistant and better at handling movement. The bond runs to the hull as well as the beam, so the load transfers directly into the hull sidewall rather than relying entirely on the beam socket connection.
One engineering consideration that came up during installation was pre-tensioning — standard practice on large racing catamarans with removable martingales, where you deflect the beam under load before pinning the strap so it sits with built-in tension. On a fixed assembly this substantial the forestay tension takes care of it the moment the rig is loaded.
Cover laminates went on over the double bias — woven cloth to cap the fibres and protect against tearing — and the trampoline frames were going up while the last layers cooked under vacuum. A serious piece of structural engineering, done properly.
The full front end build — from the first beam sections through to sea trial — is all documented in the series. If you want to go deeper on the engineering decisions behind any of it, the members’ technical library is where we cover the detail. Join here.