Rethinking the rig

After a few more launches, I'd had it with the sprit rig. With the sail laced to the mast, the only way to reduce sail is to douse it by brailing, which causes lots of flapping and drag, and the brailing line gets fouled in various ways. Bringing down the sail means striking down the mast. The sprit is hard to tension properly (seems that I hung the snotter too high). But the worst problem is the difficulty of controlling the sail's shape without a boom, which makes tacking difficult, and the traveler I had to rig up for the mainsheet interferes with tiller and outboard. Adding a boom would solve some of these problems but would increase rig complexity.

So I thought about it and decided that a new rig would be a good idea, which suits my tinkerer's heart nicely (this will be the sixth rig for three boats). I had some good experiences with a standing lug rig with a sprit boom, if we discount the disaster involving the flimsy foremast of my cat ketch breaking in a stiff wind. Since the current mast is robust enough at a diameter of 75 mm (3 inches), I can concentrate on the pluses of the rig. Only three control lines (halyard, snotter, sheet), same as the sprit rig. Reefable and easier to deploy, not to mention take down. A sprit boom doesn't hit you on the head, needs no boom vang or gooseneck/jaws. And no fancy sheeting system is needed.

I took to pencil and paper and designed a new sail of roughly the same trapezoidal shape, but will need some cloth removed and some added to the existing one. There will be a small addition of square footage (up to about 112 square feet or 10.4 square meters) and the center of effort (COE) will be almost the same. My inspiration once again is John Welsford's Houdini and David Nichols' book on traditional sails for small boats. Regarding spars, I am simply shortening the existing sprit into the new boom, and making a very plain yard out of stock lumber.

I also decided to follow kind advice from the Wooden Boat Forum about the tiller. Between the sheet and the outboard, the existing tiller gets in the way. So I am replacing it with a Norwegian tiller, which runs at a right angle to the rudder, parallel withe the transom, and is controlled by a long pole with push-pull action. This will allow me to sit wherever I need to in the boat, and to use a simple 2:1 sheet tackle attached to the center of the transom top. The wood was cut to rough size and planed before I left; I will shape it and cut the mortises (one in the top of the rudder, one in the tiller's tenon for a wedge to keep it in place) when I get back to Greece.

I folded the sail into my carry-on bag and brought it back to California. I had plenty of leftover sailcloth but needed more luff tape and grommets. I also bought a sailmaker's palm for hand stitching but have not needed it yet. I was reminded that sewing a sail with a regular sewing machine is doable if a bit of a pain, and it's not worth my while to invest in anything more than heavy duty needles. The reconfigured sail is now (November 11) ready for next spring (the pandemic permitting). I will update readers with photos then.

Making the new sail

I left the boat in Greece back in November. I will be getting back to it in late April, hoping to finish it this spring and summer. While in the United States, I bought some chandlery (pieces of specialized hardware) and found some more left over from previous boat building efforts. I also designed and made the new sail. Like I said before, this time the rig will be a very simple, traditional and sturdy one, a sprit. One mast, one sail with a sprit (a sort of yard holding up the peak of the trapezoidal sail, attached to the mast with a piece of line improbably named a snotter). No halyard, no boom, no reefing. The mainsheet will be attached directly to the clew. The whole sail will be ready to be doused in an emergency with a simple contraption called a brailing line. Brailing pulls the leech and the sprit up against the mast, instantly killing the sail's power. Thanks to David Nichols' book The Working Guide to Traditional Small-Boat Sails for many of the ideas.

As usual, I bought my sailmaking supplies at sailmakerssupply.com. The sail is trapezoidal, approximately 100 square feet (9.2 m2). It's the largest single sail I've made, with a 9 ft luff, 12'8" leech and 10 ft foot. As with previous ones, it has three-layer reinforcing patches and grommets in each corner (first photo). It also has a series of grommets on the taped luff (second photo). These will be used to permanently lace the luff to the mast.

I used a dart (second photo) at the tack and broadseaming (a seam of variable width) down the middle to add camber (curvature) to the sail. There is an extra couple of grommets on the leech: one for the brailing line to go through and one to secure the peak if I choose to drastically reduce sail by another improbably named technique called scandalizing: this involves removing the sprit and folding the sail into a triangle. We'll see how that works and I will try to post photos of scandalizing in action when the time comes.

I will carry the folded sail and other supplies in my luggage. Hopefully the boat will be ready for them before the end of the summer. If not, we'll see how it goes in 2020. Getting the boat registered, plus buying and registering a trailer and a small outboard are such complex bureaucratic maneuvers that I have no idea when my boat will hit the water.

New sails and standing rigging

I’ve been quiet for many months.  Between travels, lots of work pressure and a winter that will enter the history books for its horribleness, progress on the new rig had been slow.  Given what the spring has been like for far too long (last I checked Lake Erie still had some ice!), there was no real hurry.  In a brief interval between blizzards and polar temperatures (in my unheated garage epoxy will not cure in very cold weather), I managed to put two coats of epoxy on the new mast and bowsprit, and shaped and glued/screwed oak pad eyes at the mast top to anchor the shrouds and forestay.  

Then I made the new sails.  The methods of construction are the same as he ones I used for the sails of the original rig, and include luff and head tape plus reinforcing multi-layer patches and/or tapes in a total of thirteen places (7 corners and 6 reefing cunninghams).  Of course the sails are different.  The mainsail is about 85 square feet (7.9 m²), and that’s much larger than anything I have ever made before.  It’s a trapezoid roughly 8 feet (head) by 8 feet (luff) by 11 feet (foot) by 15 feet (leech).  It has two rows of reefing points (made with grommets this time, since buttonhole sewing is really tiresome), and several grommets along the luff to attach it to the mast with line and dowel toggles.  Curvature was built in with a dart starting at the tack, and with broadseaming (variable overlaps in the seams).

The jib is roughly 12.5 feet (luff) by 6.5 feet (foot) by 10.5 feet (leech), which works out to about 35 square feet (3.25 m²).  It has one set of reef points and a small dart starting at the tack.  It will be attached to the forestay with plastic jib hanks.  I will show photos when the sails are up.

The next step was to finish the new spars with two coats of varnish.  Then came the standing rigging, something the original masts did not have—simple but weak, as I found out to my regret.   I first attached anchor plates to the gunwales, gluing squares of oak just below the rubrails and driving heavy duty steel screws through to the frames.  Turnbuckles for tightening the standing rigging were added to the anchor plates.  Two steel pad eyes were bolted through the tip of the bowsprit as well.  Then I ventured into the totally uncharted territory of making the shrouds and forestay out of Amsteel Blue rope.  To secure them to the mast, hull (shrouds) and bowsprit (forestay) I had to make eye splice loops; large ones to go around the mast top at the top end, small ones to go around thimbles at the lower end.  There was a line that anchors the bowsprit tip to the bow as well, and it needed two more eye splices around thimbles.  I thought it would be fun to learn a different way of splicing, the so-called “long bury” type: it involves tapering the working end of the rope (by unraveling and cutting of half the strands), then pulling it down the inside of the standing part.  The rule of thumb is that the buried tail needs to be 72 times the diameter of the rope, or 9 inches for 1/8 inch rope.  This makes an eye loop as strong as the rope itself.  

The eight eye splices took many hours, mostly of self-training with trial and error.  I finally settled on a method that uses a length of thin wire folded double to pull the tail end of the line through the middle.  Once I got that to work on the first splice, the rest were much easier.  The top loops that go around the mast have hollow rope sleeves around them to protect from chafing.  All eye splices are strengthened (serviced) with heavy-duty waxed thread.   Advice for would-be splicers: make sure you leave extra rope, since the buried tail thickens and shortens the rope where the splice is.  I didn’t leave quite enough and had to work hard to make sure the shrouds were not too short.  

 

The first photo shows the shrouds  and forestay loops through their pad eyes with the white rope sleeves.  It also shows the throat halyard block on its spliced line loop and the peak halyard block on a steel eye strap bolted through the mast top. The second shows the hardware at the tip of the bowsprit and the line that goes to the bow, with its two thimbles and eye splices.

The next post will be about the running rigging.

boatbuilder

More mast and sail work

Two weekends ago I sanded the oars down to a ready-to-epoxy stage.  Then I finished the scarfing of the mast boards (or so I thought) by doing a lot of sanding.  Then I test-fitted the boards together.  Amazingly, they fit to the right length (except for an extra inch of length on one layer), but some of the scarf joint surfaces needed to be sanded further for a better fit.  I did some of the gluing at one end of each mast (first photo, left side).  I also ordered as much chandlery as I could think of from Annapolis Performance Sailing and Jamestown Distributors.

Last weekend I re-sanded the remaining scarf surfaces, then I finished gluing up the main mast blank (first photo, right side).  While the epoxy was curing, I bought the lumber for the boat's floor (mainly cedar 1X4 boards), and filled the recessed nail holes in the boat's top and insides with putty.  The next day I glued up the mizzen mast.

This week I finished the sails by putting in battens (photo) and reef points.  Finally, I started on the shaping of the masts.  This involved first trimming the laminated piece from 2½ X 2¼ inches to 2¼ square, then cutting the corners off at a 45-degree angle for an octagonal cross-section (last photo).  The rest will be achieved by rounding the eight corners with drawknife and hand plane, then sanding.  There will be tapering from mast partner to mast step, plus a little at the top.  I will have to do all this to both masts before they can be epoxied and varnished. 

The next steps will be:

1. Cut a hole for an inspection port next to the main mast hole, for access to the space between bow and first bulkhead.   This compartment may have some water leaking into it through the edges of the mast hole.  Rather than build an elaborate mast tube with drainage system, I will simply dry the compartment as needed.  It may also provide useful storage.
2. Sand the benches and the decking.
3. Fillet all the joints along the bottom (seat risers and  bulkheads with bottom, and seat risers with frames).  This will improve strength and the water-tightness of compartments.
4. Build the ballast box.
5. Put in oarlock sockets and carve the boat's name on the rubrails (in English and Greek).
6. Lay two coats of epoxy on insides and decks. 
7. Fill the ballast box with lead shot.
8. Put in the floor and epoxy the planks.
9. Finish everything with paint or varnish.
10. Set up the rigging.

Wow, that's still a lot of work.  In case you are wondering why I often list my next steps, it's mainly for my own benefit: I need to work out the sequence because I designed the boat and the rigging and everything else and I am figuring out stuff as I go along.

So keep checking 176inches as the saga continues.

boatbuilder

Making the sails, part II

Today I finished one of the sails (except for batten pockets and reef points), and the other is on its way.  First I cut and glued together (using double-sided seam tape) all the reinforcing patches, each with three layers.  The tack and clew patches are quarter-circles, and so are the patches at the reef-corners (which are actually known as cunninghams, don't ask me why).  The throat patches are obtuse angles, and the peak patches are acute angles.  (See previous post for explanations of the terms).  In all there were 12 three-layer sets, for a total of 36 pieces.  They look like pieces of a nun's wimple, or complicated origami.  In fact they will keep the stress-points of the sails from being ripped by yards, sprits, downhauls, etc.

Half of these were stitched onto the mainsail, with the inner edges turned under.  The bottom edges of the reef corner (cunningham) patches had to be finished with 2-inch sailmaker's tape.  Then the leech and foot were finished by stitching the edge under.  Then the luff and head were finished with 3-inch sailmaker's tape.  You can see the sail after all the stitching in the second photo, taken from the top of the stairs.  My daughter's cat finds the whole sailmaiking scene an endless playground, so she wouldn't budge.  It adds a little scale and human interest to the whole thing, I feel.  You can tell that the sail has curvature built into it: it will not lie flat on the floor.

Then I put in grommets in the six reinforced corners,  and every eight inches along the head (to lace it onto the yard).  The third photo shows some detail of the grommets.  In some places there were so many layers of cloth that it took a lot of pounding with the cylindrical hole cutter to cut through all of them.

So there you have it.  I don't think I'll be able to finish the mizzen sail this weekend, but both should be done before the month is out.

There will be more, you can be sure of that, so keep checking 176inches.

 boatbuilder

Making the sails, part I

Sailmaking (and mending) is traditionally a winter activity, and so it is for me.  The only carpentry-related thing I did since the new year was to laminate together two layers of 1X2 lumber for each yard.  The main yard will be 8 feet (2438 mm) and the mizzen 7 foot 4 inches (2235 mm).  I need to round the edges, sand and finish, but that can wait.  Which brings us to the sails.

I ordered my materials from Sailmakers' Supply, including 16 yards of sailcloth, thread, seamstick (2-sided tape to hold seams together while sewing), sailmakers' tape, a grommet kit (including cutter, punch and die) and a couple of other things.  I ordered 36-inch-wide cloth, with plenty of extra for screw-ups.  The supplier sent me 56-inch wide cloth by mistake (I think) so rather than sending it back I used it.  It took fewer seams and I have even more left over, but the wider expanses of cloth were a little harder to handle.  All in all a good outcome.

Sails are actually airfoils, similar to wings.  They work better if their shape is optimized, and that involves curvature in three dimensions and things such as flare and camber.  Last time I made sails I knew nothing about this and I cut and sewed them dead flat.  They work OK (they stretch and bend with the wind) but I wanted to do better this time.

Before I go on let me spell out the terms.  A trapezoidal sail has four sides and four corners.  Not surprisingly, each has a unique name, obscure to all but sailors.  The four sides are foot (bottom), head (top), luff (leading edge, forward), and leech (trailing edge, aft).  The four corners are tack (forward bottom), clew (aft bottom), throat (forward top) and peak (aft top).

To put some 3-D curvature into the sails, I did the following to each:

1.  I put a curve in the foot (about 3 inches maximum).
2.  I put a curve in the head (2 inches max), partly to accommodate the bending of the yard.
3.  I sewed a dart starting at the tack (3/4 inch maximum fold width, or double that in total overlap) and moving up and in diagonally.
3.  I used broadseaming, that is seams of variable width, with maximum at the luff and minimum about 40% aft.  I used a rule of thumb of about 1/2 inch extra seam width per 30 inches on the luff end, less at the leech.

Working with sailcloth is tough.  It's slippery, crinkly and stiff.  Plus I had to remember after several years how to wind bobbins and thread the sewing machine and all that.  Plus one of our cats went nuts with all the thread, tape, scraps and crinkly cloth, so I had to lock her away many times.  But I am happy to say that the basic cutting and sewing of the sail shapes is done. 

The next steps are:
1. Sew on reinforcing patches for the four corners.  Ditto for the extra tack and clew corresponding to each reef.  I intended to have two reefs in each sail but may keep it to one.
2. Finish the foot and leech by sewing the edges under.
3. Finish the luff and head with tape.
4. Put in grommets in the four corners (and reef corners) and along the head (to lash it to the yard).

I will post photos once the sails are nicely finished.  After that there is also sewing the reef points and batten pockets.  I'll explain then.

Until then, keep checking 176 inches.

boatbuilder