Companionway

So here is the companionway pine ladder almost finished today. Needs some bug fixes but otherwise seems ok.

The handle at the bottom is for two year olds.  The next one is for six year olds.

Anyone needs saw dust from the planing of the yard and mast?

We also fit the mast top hardware. Tomorrow it will get some paint. Then we just wait for the line to find it’s way to this godforsaken place until we can raise the mast! (Ricard can you come and give us a hand?)

Big boat boarding

Crown Jewel is a big boat. Even though it is 36 ft on deck, it really should be compared to boats over 40 ft. We needed to be able to climb the bow from our low jetty, so today we fitted a ladder.

Progress

Great progress today. Most of the grommets in the sail are done (only one batten left) and we shaped a tree into a yard.

A picture of my try at double spar taper by eye ball:

It is supposed to be thinner at the ends and fat at the middle. And it is also supposed to have all the taper at the top. (Otherwise the straight edge of the sail will be baggy, and we can’t let that happen to a junk sail can we?) But I agree the spars aren’t perfectly straight. I suppose we are one of those boats giving junk rigs a bad reputation. Like my grandfather said when I told him we were going to rig our boat with a junk rig: “Poor bastards.” But he meant the Chinese junks he met when he was a sailor.

And some pics of the sail with grommets:

Tomorrow we will try some handsewn rings at the nock and peak.

Line for the junk rig – and the sailmakers secret weapon

Some things they say about the junk rig are true. It has a great appetite for line. I live in the capital of Sweden, Stockholm, a city of about one million people and one million boats. And the chandlers didn’t have enough line in stock and had to order it.

So how much line do you think Linnea needs for the one sail? Including running rigging and the bolt rope around the sail.

Is it:

A. Less than 100 meters?

B. Between 100 and 200 meters?

C. More than 300 meters?

Now the picture of the sailmakers secret weapon:

A stapler! We finished all the machine sewing on the sail tonight thanks to the stapler. It was perfect for temporary attaching the corner patches and tablings before sewing. The thing is, no double sided tape works on our “sail cloth”, which is called Top Gun and is actually a really strong vinyl coated polyester fabric. So tomorrow we will try to fit all the grommets. The boltrope will have to wait until we get the line though.

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.

At the jetty

As you can see the bow is really high in Linnea. We need to use some sort of ladder to board her when laying at a jetty like this. As you can see the bow is floating really high. The mast will lower it significantly. But I think we need to put some ballast there as well. At least until we start to use the storage large compartment at the bow.

Put on the last oil on the mast today. Joel helped out. Tomorrow I will make the hardware for the mast top out of oak.

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.

Painted bottom

The hull looks much nicer with the anti fouling paint. More similar to how she will look in the water. So I just thought I should share a picture. Yesterday I also finished all but the last 6 mm wire for the stanchions (they are actually double like shark fins).