Home Sailmaking Breakthrough of Sorts

[s vernon]

Anyone who cares about making their own sails, and I know that is an extremely limited audience among EC12 sailors, should take a look at the "Sailmaking" discussion on Chads forum www.rcsailing.net . A man in Nice is spreading the word about a method that he found on an Italian web page. Seems like a very simple way to make sails. Fully adjustable - ahh - we like the sound of that. I think he chimes in on about page 7 or 8 of the discussion.

The gist of it seems to be that you have a of metal or clear plastic rectaungular rod that is attached to a fixture in the middle and then bent using wedges. You place/temporarily stick down a sail panel on top of it, then remove the wedges allowing the rod to straighten. Then apply double sided tape and lay/permanently stick down a second sail panel on top. And voila, you have a cambered/broadseamed seam. The method comes complete with a table for computing wedge size versus camber. It will take a bit of experimenting to get it right. You can even change the position of max draft from say 50 percent to 45 or 40.

The discussion is full of semiuseless entries such as "lets call this xxx", and why didn't I get as much camber as I thought I would? Because you used the wedge thickness guide as mm instead of as % and then using the guide to compute the mm. At present there are over 100 entries and 12 pages of discussion and images. Good stuff.

Someone needs to take all of the good info and make it into one set of instructions, but the whole thing seems so straightforward that it should be easy to do it just based on the images and info in the discussion group. I would not be surprised to see Lester Gilbert someday put it on his site.

I'll finally be able to make a bottom seam that has little enough broadseaming to emulate a (low bottom seam) DT or W or John B sail. Good news for me, eh John?

Then use the "raise the clew" method shown in Piedmont Model Yacht Club's Sailmaking 101 web page to cut the luff curve and you are on your way.

Scott