Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Friggin in the Riggin

As I near the end of the build and approach some semblance of a launch date I realize how many little things I still need to wrap up.  So many in fact, that I feel a bit like a mental patient who hasn't taken his meds in a week or so.  The shop looks like hurricane Irma hit it and I'm getting a bit crazy.

As of my last count, I have the following major projects in a partially completed state:

  1.  Daggerboard
  2.  Rudder assembly (the whole steering thing in fact with Norwegian tiller)
  3.  Floorboards
  4.  Interior fairing and paint
  5.  Sails and Rig

There are lots of other things that I know I won't get done before my first test launch this fall, but the projects above are 'must haves' if I want to get the boat in the water and test it out before winter inevitably hits Central New Hampshire.  Being a backwards kind of guy, I decided to focus on #5 (sails and rig) this week.  On paper, it seems like I had this all wrapped up a while ago, but if you do a little math, having a bunch of spars I built that are hanging on a wall does not make a completed rig.

In between other projects from the week before, we had a good stretch of weather that gave me the opportunity to protect the spars using Deks Olje D1.  It's a combination of oils that need to be reapplied from time to time, but it is way easier than actually varnishing and gives the spars a nice warm satin finish.  We'll see how it holds up, but it's easy to apply and looks nice so far.

In the previous post I also mentioned leathering up the chafe areas on the spars so I had that taken care of as well, but that was about it for rig.  All the lines, blocks, sails, and everything else that makes a rig a rig needed to be done.

The sails had shown up several weeks before from Michael Storer's Really Simple Sails (He designed the Goat Island Skiff which is a similar boat to the Campion Apple).  I had taken them out briefly only to verify that the measurements were correct, but waited for the spars to be Dek'd before doing anything with them.

I am a total newbie when it comes to lug rigs (or any traditional rig for the matter), so this is all a learning curve for me.  A yard always meant something you grow grass on and make your kids mow; but now there are two on the boat.  Very confusing, and there seems to be about 10 million ways to rig a balanced lug depending on your budget.  I've spent almost every night for the last month researching the rigging procedure and asking questions on the woodenboat forum and other resources.  Now the time had come to just jump in and find out what sucks.

I had decided to use a mast traveler based on a bunch of posts recommending it in the woodenboat forum.  The traveler is basically a steel hoop with a hook to hold onto the yard and a halyard tied to the top end.  They don't bind on the mast and make the whole rig very easy to disassemble.

My welding skills are pretty weak, but it looked like the kind of project I could do.  I went through a number of iterations before settling on a design that I could live with and actually worked.  I used stainless steel rod but the weld is just regular steel so I coated them with rustoleum to keep out some corrosion.  I still have to leather the rings, but I think they will do fine.

Onto the sail, I started by lacing up the mizzen to the yard by tying each end off tight (the throat and peak) and then lacing the grommets in between with nylon cord that came with the sail. Pretty easy, but I'm sure it will need to be adjusted once I actually sail this thing.  Next, I tied off the tack and clew to the fore and aft ends of the boom.

For the mast I through bolted a Harken Carbo 29 cheek block to the aft side and ran Dynema line through it and tied it off to the mast traveler I made.  I tested it on our back deck by tying the mast to picnic table benches and hoisting the sail.
Amazingly, it didn't look terrible and despite me wondering how the yard would raise up above the mast, it did in fact do so.  Once you see it done, it makes total sense.  I added a cleat to the mizzen mast on the starboard side and moved onto the main mast.

The main was almost the same just bigger.  The only difference was that I used another Harken Carbo 29 cheek block through bolted to the aft end of the boom and a clam cleat just forward of that to make an easily adjustable outhaul.  Then I tied the tack to the forward end of the boom and ran a line from the clew through the outhaul block and made it fast in the clam cleat.

Finally, it was time to bring it all together.  I pulled the boat out of the shop and stepped both masts and raised the sails for a dry sail.  Again, I was amazed that it all worked and looked halfway decent. I showed some of the photos to Michael Storer (see above) who is an expert on balanced lug sails and he gave me a few pointers on what could be improved, but it wasn't a disaster.

I still have to rig the main sheet to the boom and setup the boomkin and sheet for the mizzen, but I've mounted the main sheet swivel base on the daggerboard trunk, so I'm pretty close to crossing this project off the list.






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