Bamboo batten blues – again

Today the bamboo for the battens finally arrived. But they are too thin. Obviously there was some misunderstanding in how to measure the diameter.

So we got 26 canes. 5,4 meters long. (That means about a third of the batten will be overlapped and seized in the middle.) At the thick end they were 40-45 mm while we were aiming for 80 mm at the top and 60 mm at the bottom of the sail. The thin end was 20-25 mm.

The good thing is that we have more than twice as many canes as we need. So we should be able to use battens on both sides of the sail. This will give a slightly heavier sail than to use a thicker batten on the mast side and just something thin to lash on on the other side. Two 40 mm battens are also not as strong as one 80 mm. So I am pretty sure they will bend too much and possibly break in any heavy wind. But we will know more about that when we have tried it. The battens were also different. Some where thicker at both ends, so we will put them at the top.

This is what the battens looked like:

We also brought the sail aboard so we can lash it all together tomorrow and cut the rest of the running rigging, like lazy jacks, sheets, sheetlets and downhaul. I added a mast lift even though it isn’t in Tom’s plans, to help the lazy jacks hold the sail up at the forward end. It also gives an extra line up the mast, that might be handy to have.

Let’s see what happens tomorrow!

Sail is finished

A longsplice by my father in the bolt rope finished the sail. Now it is just the battens…

2 m/h roping

My mother can rope a sail at 2 meters/hour. Look!

This corner is nine layers of 11 American oz Top Gun polyester cloth. Roping really adds a nice look to a junk sail. Some people like to save time by sewing on webbing or just reinforce with a rolled tabling.

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.

Grommets by the gross

No, don’t read the headline as proof of my love for alliterations. We just ordered three gross of #3 spur grommets. I like to think that the sail is finished. But as you can see, I am an optimist when it comes to adding the last touch. Like three gross of grommets. Hopefully attaching them to the sail will go really quick!

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.