Sunday, December 6, 2015

Furlex part 5 The foils, extrusions and sails


 We talked about the foils a bit earlier in the videos but just to review, make sure they are strait and not kinked and here is why, to disassemble this foil with the spring clips,
1 remove the cable as instructed in part 1 and 2
2 now lay your assembled foil on a long flat surface
3 take a wood dowel or soft rod and place it in the end of the foil (either side) against the black plastic insert that held your cable and strike it with a good hammer, you may have to soak the connections with LPS or WD Blaster.
4 If you have kinks in the joint of each section this part is going to be difficult to do, if not the rod will drive all the inserts forward at the same time and all will fall apart as one unit.
mark them clean them up and store all parts in a Ziploc bag.

To reassemble all that you just did is done in reverse with the cable installed, this will come later.

In an earlier post I explained how to measure your new head stay with the furler drum attached . You then followed the instructions to determine the overall length of the extrusions and cut the top one to length. Good Job ,Well done
Take the parts and lay them out in the yard and just temporally assemble them.

Next we are going to measure the head sail.

If you have the old one that came on the furler,
 it will have to be recut down to size, in doing so you will loose size from the foot and luff .
Position your foot


note how much longer the head is now

this will have to be cut back

I would recomend taking your sail at this point to a sailshop and have it evaluated for how much size you are going to loose with this mod and what your cost is going to be.
also if the sail is even worth the modification.

I took a 1.5 hr roadtrip to www.vtsailing.com    Vermont sailing partners 
 for an evaluation of my headsail and it didnt take long to determine that this sail was not servicable any more.
The problem was when the sail was stored it was wound on the furler backwords thus exposing the sail to the elements and the cove was well prserved on the wrong side ,so the sail is a loss.

If youplan to use your old hankon furler 

The same applies as above in addition you will have to have the hanks cut off the fut and replaced with luff tape, any sailshop will do this for you at a reasonable cost asuming the sail is the right length if not it will also have to be cut down and you loose size again.
Some sailors are handy enough with a sewing machine to do this yourself and a good scource for this is Sailrite .com   http://www.sailrite.com/. again this can become a cost issue as it was with me.


My option and #3 is to shop on Ebay ther are many sails there up for sale ,just make sure you know exactly what size you need ,foot ,luff and leach and start shopping.
Thats how I found mine for under $200.00 dollars ,much cheaper than having the old ones modified .

In our next post we will see what i bought and also show you how to sew up that old faverate hank-on and make an inner stay jib out of it.