Spinnaker Spun

This is the final spinnaker construction post. There will be something on how it flies, but we'll wait for the weather.

The final tasks were sewing on foot and leech tapes, and the luff tape. The foot and leech are finished with folded strips of ripstop nylon. I cut 20 mm ribbons of cloth from the scraps after cutting the panels. The ribbons were taped on the inside of the marked out lines and cut with the soldering iron. I then used the tape to baste the ribbons on one edge of the sail and then folded the ribbons around and onto the other side of the sail.

This looks difficult, but it worked out well. 

Once the ribbon was tapped in place, it was easy to zig-zag stitch over the ribbons with the machine.

The next task was the luff tape. This is made from a 50mm Dacron strip. This was folded and creased over the edge of a table (see Sailrite Spinnaker videos) then tapped on and sewn. Easy. You can see the luff tape in the picture below.

The luff tape also has a 1.5mm dyneema luff cord inside with small loops of webbing sewn at each end to allow the cord to be tied off as follows:

The final job was to make up the corners. I used a similar construction to that shown in the Sailrite videos. I found the lengths of my panels were not as consistent as I'd hoped, but I was able to cover up and compensate using the corner patches.

I used three colours of webbing in the corners so as to mark the head, tack and clew. 50mm stainless rings were sewn in.

Pudding and eating comes to mind at this stage. If it's a disaster, will I tell you all ? We'll have to wait and see. Only another few weeks until the boat goes back in after the winter. Would I build another sail? Well probably as with experience, another would not be too much work. It's been enjoyable.

For information the sail is: Luff: 6.2m, Leach 5.8m, Foot 4.6m Total area - 21.5 sq m.