Hayden,
I looked through your blog, about replacing the mast pin, etc. Our mast doesn't (spell that has never had) have a mast pin. The collar has the holes, but the mast has never been drilled out for a pin - and yes, I know this because I've had the mast out twice.
The question here is - when inserting the pin, how do you get it to come out the other side properly, given you have such a small, and shrinking, space to grasp, as you insert the pin. I've always been concerned that the pin might drop down as it approaches the far side of the mast (inside), wedge there, and be almost non-retrievable, and not in correctly. The solution I had thought of would be to "glue" one end of the pin to a long wooden dowel (or some such) that could be fed in, and that had enough length that it could be maneuvered to properly come out the far-side hole. After pushing the actual pin in, the dowel could be "popped off" at the glue point. How did you tackle this issue?
I also note that you don't have a mast wedge in the new setup. You new collar is considerably tighter around the new mast than my original mast and collar. (Isomat mast from 1994)
Any comments about the above would be appreciated.
PlumBob