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.
In This Series
This post is part of the Front End Build Series. Load paths, vacuum bagging, forestay fittings, seagull striker, martingale, trampoline installation and sea trials are all documented in the series Paikea’s Carbon Front End Rebuild.
The entire playlist is featured below:
- Building a Carbon Front Beam from America’s Cup Mast Sections
- Catamaran Front Beam Load Paths: Why We Replaced Aluminium with Carbon
- Building a Carbon Fibre Seagull Striker and Martingale
- Installing the Carbon Fibre Martingale
- Vacuum Bagging Complex Geometry: Joining a Carbon Beam to a Hull
- Removing the Vacuum Bag: What Good Consolidation Actually Looks Like
- The Carbon Longeron: How a Recycled America’s Cup Mast Changed Everything
- Carbon Fibre Bow Pole: Finishing the America’s Cup Front End
- Forestay Attachment and Wet Preg: Engineering the Pin Into a Carbon Longeron
- How to Install a Dyneema Trampoline on a Catamaran
- Carbon Anchor Roller, Nav Lights, and the Final Details
- Designing a Stowable Anchor System for a Carbon Front Beam
- Sea Trials With Our New Mainsail: Proof-Loading the Front End
- Paikea’s First Sea Trial: Carbon Front Beam, New Rudders, and a Midnight Sewing Job
Additional behind the scenes photos of the build showing more detail in the members’ technical library Join here.