Originally for St Mary's church (West Sussex) youth group's radio control yacht building and racing project
Saturday, 4 June 2011
Sails and Rigging etc
I think a techy blog with some close ups is over due, during the build the emphasis was more on our progress rather than any detail and admittedly the hull was pretty much a bog standard balsa box but the sails and rigging were open to improvisation and it all had to be done on a tight budget too!
This was my first real go a sail making, I had a go before on my old yacht Seagull but those sails now look pretty inefficient now but where made before the advent of the internet! The original Papaya 3 plans have a swing rig but I've heard they are a bit tricky to set up and I'll be honest I don't like the look of them even if they are more efficient! I really wanted to avoid sewing too, it might sound sexist but it's true teenage boys aren't known for there needle craft! So I decided to use the nylon from £1 shop umbrellas (and later found a red and white golf umbrella inside out in a bin at the park!) We cut them so an existing seem ran along the luff and left a little bit of that double thickness part sticking out so we could tie onto it a tension it. We super glued strengthening patches on to the Head and clew (and some of the tack) corners so we could attach an eyelet to them. We just hope the leech and foot don't fray too much! The battens were made simply with lines of super glue on one side. The masts, booms and jibs are aluminum tubing, not the lightest but cheap and as I work as a wireman nearly every other fitting was fashioned from various P clips! Time was getting ahead of us so I made up the fittings in the form of kits. Most of the ends of the tubes have super glued P clips on short lengths of nylon (pneumatic) tubing that simply push in and finished off with the head of a plastic rivet to keep it tidy. The swan necks are two different size clips. (Though I notice they could be a bit more freer in light winds - a drop of WD40 on the mast seems to help!)
Larger pneumatic tubing also was used for the sheet feed tube and I made most of the bowsies from short lengths of cable tie, just one for slot adjustment and one for the kicking strap, I didn't want to over complicate things.
So to sum up, I didn't even know how competitive they would be against other footys but they seem to sail well enough and cost us very little just using some ingenuity with the parts I had hanging around.
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