HOT INTERFACE ZONE: PART 3 by Danilo Fabbroni
Another benchmark in the matching of ropes and gear might surely be
seen on primaries winches. I personally remember when the skipper of a
Baltic 64’ during the late eighties, before crossing the Atlantic,
demanded not to carry any more heavy and difficult to manage spinnaker
afterguys made with the wire-to-rope system. We came up with an
afterguy made with a line picked up from the industrial catalogue of
Samson: Spectron 12, which is a single braid made of spectra and
jacketed with a silver urethane coating, to prevent yarns being caught
and snagged on pointy spots. To overcome the problem of Spectron 12
being totally slippery on winch grip and self tailing jaws, we sleeved
the line with a polyester cover in the sole zone where the brace was
working in the winch between tight reaching and fully downwind sailing.
Today, the state of the art sees the innovation of cover material gone towards the use of PBO: a turning point pioneered by Gottifredi & Maffioli1 cordage makers.
Another difficult situation might be experienced specially on jammers. Lines became even smaller, reaching diameters almost unmanageable by human hands. Transpac 52s fly a 5/16” halyard! Although this helped with the halyard lock on the mast, it produced a very tricky task in the pit winch self tailing area. Loads, worsening the situation, are ever increasing due to higher righting moments, and unstretchable rigs and sails.
In the early days of exotic fibres, we used to try an alternative method of sleeving the line on the most loaded area, putting a tiny piece of line inside the core and keeping it there with a hard stitching. These days, sophisticated blends of materials like Cordura, Kevlar, Vectran,2 Technora,3 or even highly priced PBO Zylon4 mixed with more traditional polyester give a much better result, eliminating the step in the reinforced zone of the halyard which was never a user-friendly feature! Also the diffusion of the mast locks where the halyard can be stopped give a better life cycle of halyards and clutches. This is dramatically important when a Code 0 is on: a sail which is definitely a deck gear killer, due to its unbelievably huge load both on head, tack and clew.
Final part of this series of posts on the hot interface zone coming up next...
Danilo
___________________________________________
1 See www.gottifredimaffioli.com website for further details.
2 Vectran is a registered trademark of Hoechts Celanese.
3 Technora is a registered trademark of Tejiin.
4 Pbo Zylon is a registered trademark of Toyobo.
Comments