Tripple-block – will it fit?

This might be a little bit too much details for some people. But I am a little bit worried that the tripple block for the halyard won’t lay flat against the mast. It is supposed to be hold out by the “truck”-shaped oak cleat. But it doesn’t look ennough. Time will tell. I guess this might be one of the small problems.

Mast hardware

Today I was kind of lazy. Made the cleats for the mast top. It is used for attaching the halyard and lazy jacks. And also the halyard cleats for the yard. All attatchment points use a grommet or splice around the mast.

Now the oak clats lay soaking up lin seed oil over the night.

The sail!

Now we try to cut back on things that are not really needed to do trial sails. And we try to find stuff that really needs to be finished before we can sail. So the sail itself has quite high priorities. So after giving the mast some more Owatrol we brought out the sail to sew the last (top) panel to it.

Maybe we are overdoing it a little, but instead of tripple stitching we actually sew the top panel woth five. What to call that? Quint-stitch? It was because the batten reinforcement that covered the tripple stitching added two more rows. Maybe this sail and I can celebrate our retierment together in about 30 years.

I should explain everything about making a junk sail, because it is really quite simple and fun. Maybe that is the explanation why sail makers get so angry when they hear about junk sails. Maybe I’ll fill in some more info later. But for now I can say that we use Top Gun as recommended by Tom Colvin. It is cheap, quite soft like cotton and doesn’t need to be covered from the sun. Sewing a 800 sq ft sail from ordinary sail cloth would be much more difficult. Top Gun is polyester, just like ordinary dacron, but it isn’t hard like heat treated dacron. It is also covered in acrylic or something similar for UV-resistance.

You don’t need to be able to spread the whole sail to sew a junk sail.

Essential reading.

I love our machine. Sailrite Ultrafeed, walking foot heavy duty.

The top panel ready for sewing. Clamped up to fit under the arm of the machine.

The only difficult thing with sewing the sail is to move the heavy cloth while sewing. The only boring thing is creasing the cloth.

We will rope the sail with 10 mm three strand rope. Sew the grommets at the top and use spur grommets everywhere else.

Now the next step is reinforcement patches. I am thinking about a good looking shape. Maybe round, but it might be hard to fold the round edge while sewing.

Picture proof of speed with baggy sails

This is pictures of Samson. A Norwegian ferro cement boat from Stavanger. It is a great boat of with a pig fence as stanchions and Ikea stuff in the cabin and you can sit in chairs on deck, while sailing insore in the beutiful Norwegian inshore waters. I sailed with it a couple of years ago and even though it has a SA/D ratio* of only 13 it has a lot of power in light winds. This is clearly seen in the pictures.

As can also bee seen in the pictures, the sails are baggy. They are also made of quite stretchy mateial, probably nylon.

So if you sew your junk sails with camber between the battens, the sail will give more power at the same wind speed.

So, camber is good? Yeah, probably. Will I use it? No. I try to not modify stuff before I try it out. The SA/D of Linnea is 17, so a flat sail will still have quite a lot of power. So, we will see if flat is ennough power. Otherwise I could resew the sail.

* SA/D=Sail Area vs Displacement ratio. Since the sail is two dimensional and the hull is three dimensional, the formula is SA/D^2/3. Otherwise the sail area and hull wouldn’t scale equally.