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Bright Ideas

Hello all,

Here are a few notions from my notebook. As is often the case, I have forgotten the names of most of the people that I learned these things from; if you recognize your Bright Idea, let me know.

1. Attach Cockpit Weather Cloths Weakly
Use light line to secure your weather cloths, light enough that if you get swamped, the water can get out, instead of turning the stern of the boat into a fair-sized swimming pool.

2. Wrap your mast
If you have a keel-stepped mast, wrap the section belowdecks with rope, leather, vinyl, veneer -- something that will keep the mast from radiating heat into the cabin on a hot day, or radiating heat into the world on a cold day. And a wrapped mast can be more pleasant to look at, and softer to fetch up against, than a bare one.

3. Reef Clewlines
Most production sailboats have the reef clewline sheaves in the end of the boom. This arrangement is great for manufacturers, as it means they can turn out booms much more quickly than if they installed separate cheek blocks on the boom for the clewlines. But it makes for lousy sail shape, and can even harm the sail, because too much effort goes into hauling the sail aft, and too little into holding it down. To make matters even worse, the arrangement allows the reef clew to "float" up, resulting in line chafe, and to prevent this you have to lash the clew to the boom with a separate line. Sheesh!

So put your deadends directly under where the clew will be at full extension, and put cheek blocks about 6" aft of this, for a much better vector of forces. Lead the lines back into the boom via halyard entrance plates, fixed to holes cut in the boom. We do this "reef upgrade" on a lot of boats, and people are always very glad of the difference it makes.

4. Proportions for a Long Splice in Wire Rope
Use a tail, for each end, that is at least seven times the wire circumference in feet. So a 2" circumference (5/8"diam.) wire uses 14 feet for each end. The obvious mnemonic here is that the wire you'll be splicing is likely 7x7 or 7x19.

5. Langdon's rig assessment question
When describing how we approach determining the condition of a rig, I typically go into great detail about the effects of climate, tune, scantlings, vessel type, alloys used, etc. Surveying a rig is -- or should be -- a complex subject, as every variable is important to the integrity of the rig. But our new apprentice, Langdon Schmitt, after listening to me go on and on about the details at too great length, summed it all up very nicely with the following question: "How good was it to begin with, and what have you done with it since?"

6. Don't Break Your Jib, Don't Break Its Halyard
For boats with roller-furling jibs, set halyard tension with the backstay at minimum (light air) tune. Then, when you tension the backstay, the halyard tension will come up proportionately. If you start with too high a tension on the halyard, then when you tighten the backstay, the halyard will get extremely tight, which isn't good for the sailcloth, the sail shape, compression loads on the boat, or the halyard itself.

On boats that undergo extreme rake changes, you will need to make ongoing halyard adjustments.

7. Lead your preventers to weather
For main boom preventers, we have always led the lines forward to the bow, then aft on the leeward side. This usually makes for an easy lead aft, but once the line reaches the cockpit it can be difficult to tend; the leeward Genoa winch is occupied, so belays are scarce, and it's one more line to tend downhill of the comfortable seats. But we've recently seen boats with the preventers led to the weather side, and this can be a whole lot easier to tend, uphill, plus you have an unoccupied winch to belay to. Getting the preventer aft to weather can be a bit more complicated than on the lee side, as you might need an extra block to get the lead clear of the house or other objects up forward, but it can be well worth the effort.

8. Snap Shackle or Cunningham Tackle for Reef Tack
In the bad old days, we had to lash down our mains'l reef tacks. Then came the notion of (a) sewing stainless rings to a piece of webbing that went through the tack ring, and (b) mounting curved reef hooks on the gooseneck. The idea is that you slack the halyard, set one of the webbing rings onto a reef hook, snug down the clew, and retighten the halyard.

This is a major improvement on lashing, but getting the ring on can involve some fumbling, and the darn things have been known to fall off the hook before you can take up on the halyard.

So try this: lash a snapshackle alongside the gooseneck, and clip this to the webbing ring. A good snapshackle is easy to close and open one-handed, the ring can't come out accidentally, and releasing the clew is just a matter of popping open the shackle. Use a non-swiveling snapshackle for even fewer fumbling opportunities.

Or how about this one: if you have a Cunningham, you can use its tackle to secure your reefs.

A little background on this one. A good Cunningham will have two parts: a "whip" line that is fixed to mast or deck on one side, and which passes through the Cunningham ring, to end in an eye; and a block-and-tackle that is secured to that eye on one end, and to the mast or deck on the other. This forms a compound purchase, so you can pull the luff tight without a winch. The same gear can be used for pulling down the reef tack, assuming that the upper block has a snapshackle head. You disconnect the block from the whip, take the whip out of the Cunningham ring and put it into the reef tack ring, reconnect the block, and snug up.

You can simplify this operation if you save the whip for the Cunningham, and take the block-and-tackle directly to a webbed-on ring at the reef tack. You lose half your purchase power, but unlike the Cunningham, tension for the reef is provided by the halyard. Note: if you choose this latter configuration, you'll need at least to double the strength of your block-and-tackle, since it will no longer be sharing the load with the whip, and loads will be higher.

9. Perfect-fitting Mast Hardware
Mounting winches, cam cleats, and other hardware to the convex surface of a mast can be a really tricky chore, since you must first build a pad for the hardware to land on, and this pad must be shaped to hug the mast. You can get an approximate shape using a contour gauge and bandsaw, but it's never quite right. A nifty shipwright's trick is to put some sticky-back sandpaper on the mast where the fitting will go, and rub the almost-fitted pad up and down on the sandpaper. Any irregularities get filed away, and you wind up with a perfect fit.

10. Vang Pucks
When fitting a rigid vang, it can be tricky to get just the right amount of spring power. Too little, and the boom sags under the weight of boom and sail; too much and you are always struggling to sheet down against the spring. Vangs usually have several pin setting locations, to vary tension, but it's basically blind luck if one of those settings suits the weight perfectly. But you can fine-tune the setting with "vang pucks": 1" to 2" thick UHMW or Delrin discs that fit inside the vang tube. These can be cut out with a holesaw to suit your vang.

The installation procedure is: set mast and boom fittings at appropriate points; set vang spring as close as possible to ideal, but err on the loose side; disassemble the vang and add one or more pucks; reassemble, check boom height, and add more pucks or move the spring pin if necessary.

11. UHMW Handrails
Our friends Elaine and Rich Goodheart are building a very nice aluminum cutter, and they came up with a wonderful idea for tough, comfortable, handsome, and weatherproof handrails for the housetop.

They started with 1/2" thick aluminum spines, welded to the deck, with cutouts on the bottom, as for an ordinary handrail. They then milled long strips of UHMW, and fastened them on, "like a knife handle" (in fact, one could use a favorite chef's knife to proportion and set the radius for the handrail). Attach the UHMW with rivets or bolts, whatever makes for a flush finish.

12. Screwdriver Drill
The next time you need to drill a hole in a space that is too tight to allow for a drill motor, chuck a drill/tap into a ratcheting screwdriver, and drill away. Slow, but wonderfully handy, especially in wood or Œglass.

What's a drill/tap? It's just like it sounds, a drill bit and tap made from one piece of metal(available at some hardware stores, though you may need to do some searching). The drill is correctly sized for the tap, so you just drill the hole, and keep on going to tap it. Ordinarily, you'd chuck it into a drill motor. It's the very best thing for aluminum, but can be used, carefully, on bronze or stainless. A great timesaver!

That's it for this installment. I'd like to make Bright Ideas a semi-regular feature here, so if you have some rig-related revelations, please send them in.

Fair leads,
Brion Toss