[infinitysail]

It's time for me to change the rod on our 40 ft sailboat. The difficulty is that we are in Central America, where there are no places that do rod or really any riggers that I trust.

I have a quote from a company in the USA that says they can make the stays and ship them down to me. They will put new k200 tangs on the stays, since they are captive. I will measure the lengths and spreader bend locations and angles for them.

I plan on installing the new stays with the rig up. It is keel stepped, so I think this is reasonable using some lines as temporary stays. Obviously, you do one at a time. As I understand it, I just need to use a blowtorch to melt the loctite, remove the old tang and put the new tang in with some new loctite and fasteners.

The new forestay will be wire, as I don't want to disasssemble my furler foil (Harken MK1 unit 2). I will drop it and run the new wire on the dock, using a norseman stud at the bottom. The rod locking collar from the old forestay should work with the norseman fitting, I believe. It looks to be a 5/8 stud.

Does this sound crazy, or does it sound within reason? Are the any other considerations I am overlooking?

Thanks for the advice.