Wouter you have said that to keep costs down a mast, a cross beam etc can be ordered "one at a time" well that isn't quite how it is. If you are sailing a production boat from a manufacturer then yes, you can order a one off replacement FROM THAT MANUFACTURER, but that manufacturer has to hold that section in stock. There is no "retail outlet" here that holds in stock any but the most commonly used masts (usually round dinghy sections) and the reason that they don't is the same reason that I don't - the number of sections required and overal excessive costs of stock "on the shelf" -. If I was to source my masts from some one like Boyer or Goodall then I could possibly buy in smaller numbers, but (no disrespect to them) that would put me at the discression of their "goodwill", which is a position that no manufacturer likes to be in from another "competitor". To try to optimise the use of masts in stock, in the past we have been obliged to use the same section for cross beams as for masts, this creates a lot more waste but it means that we could justify holding larger numbers of masts in stock. It also meant that, to have a good profile for the mast, I always had to engineer the beams which added weight to them (particularly the rear beam) to restrict the flexibility of the beams between hulls.
To give you a comparison of prices, after we have launched the F14 of ours onto the market towards the end of this winter here in Australia, we will then work full time on putting the F16 on the water in it's final configuration, so that, hopefully it will be "out" before the end of our next summer. At this stage, it looks very promising that, although the F16 will be "ALL" carbon fibre, it is shaping up to be no more than the price of an F16 Taipan and probably less. The F14 is actually the "test bed" as far as prices go for the F16 as most, if not all the components that we are using for the F14 are the same on the F16. This means, amongst other things, that we are able to ascertain our cost stucture very accurately from our experience with the F14.
