How much trouble is it to make carbon fibre components and is it worthwhile?
But
the Carbon spars are not particularly hard to do - Peter is the one to
ask - but quite a few of us here have made carbon components for boats.
It's not really terribly difficult to make quite sophisticated carbon components - as the link you supplied shows.
There
are a lot of problems involved in engineering them - particularly
around stress points. They can look fine for several outings then
... BANG! It is also very easy to come up with some quite heavy
carbon bits.
I have been involved with the unstayed rigs for the
Norwalk Island Sharpies here - which use a spun tapered alloy mast with
variable diameter and wall thickness.
Some of the local composite firms reckoned they could do better than the alloy sections.
But
both were heavier - and one broke when fitted to the boat. So to
get the advantage from the carbon you need to make use of extensive
trial and error (break lots - a bit like we did with our wooden PDRs)
or use pretty sophisticated engineering methods.
Midge and I did discuss the idea of making some carbon tubes for our PDRs - but when it comes down to it ...