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