Mast | Journeyman 60

Sailor speciality: Solve the problem.

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Feb 172011

Just to give you a small insight into the work going on: Besides finishing the interior, we are also working on a long list of to-dos. One to-do is the need for the mast foot to be moved 20mm to aft in order to make the mast bend curve perfect. Unfortunately the old mounting holes did not allow this, so new holes had to be made. However, making these were not so simple, since there was no room for the drill between the mast and the tie-rod after the mast had been put in place!

So I looked around for the smallest radii rotating tool I could find, which turned out to be a pressurized air wrench handle. This tool is only 30mm in diameter and it does fit in the space above the new hole position. But since this tool is designed for socket wrenches I had to weld the drill and the threading bits to socket wrench pieces to get it to work. But in the end it all came together and the holes got made and threaded:

Sea Trial Trails

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Sep 162010

Wow! First day of REAL sea trials is done. The wind was around 20kts, with gusts up to 28kts (14 m/s). Perfect wind for really seeing how the boat behaved.

First of all, the balance was superb!!! We did not yet have the reefing lines installed, so we sailed with a full main and the staysail. Not a perfect set of sails in these conditions, but the boat was still very stable and showed no broaching tendencies. Plenty of heel of course, but the angled rudders always had full grip and never ventilated. Steering felt precise even during the gusts.

We ended the day with a long list of small and medium sized work items on the todo list, both on the rigging and on the sails. Leeches need shortening on the main and solent. Mast had a bit of an S curve so the foot and D2 stays will need adjustments. And so on. But overall, I feel it was a solid success. Many thanks to Hans, Herman and Bengt from Hamel Sails. These guys really go through everything down to the last detail in both sails and the packs in order to create easily workable solutions.

We had two professional photographers in a RIB taking pictures, but I have not managed to get any images from them yet, look out for those in a couple of days!

Back in action: Deck collar casting.

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Sep 062010

Sooo… After a lot of time spent doing other stuff that fun (=boat) stuff, I am starting to get to the bottom of the piles of cruft that have gathered since I left for Estonia.

Today I did the casting of the mast collar. The old method of inserting rubber wedges between the mast and the deck ring has apparently fallen out of fashion. Of course a cast plastic collar is much better. It is watertight and provides much better load distribution around the perimeter of the mast than a few rubber wedges would:

Disaster strikes … a spreader.

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Aug 202010

In the picture below, the keen viewer will notice that there is a spreader missing… It was damaged by a falling furler swivel during the hoisting of the mast. Hopefully the Marström team will be able to repair it over the weekend, but it still means that we won’t be able to move out of here until Sunday evening at the earliest.

On the good news side, we tried out a few of the sails and things look very good so far. Not all could be tested though, due to the spreader problem the rigging couldn’t be tensioned.