sail cloth question

[peb]

Ok, here is the situation.

The sails on my boat are of oceanus and are on their 4th year. The leech on my genoa is in pretty bad shape. It is severely cupped, imagine a leech cord pulled way too tight. The main has the same problem to a much lesser extent. I think the genoa is costing me at least 1/2 knot up wind.

So now what. I have had mixed opinions to the effectiveness of getting the sail recut. It seems like I can get rid of the cup, but the "bagginess" of the sail that causes the cup is there to stay?

I really don't like the idea of forking over money for a new sail right now. I do enjoy club racing and competing in regattas on the local lake, so the performance does matter.

If I buy a new sail, I want one that will last. Althoguh I have a 100% jib and a 80% heavy air jib, the 135% genoa gets used 80% of the time. Especially racing, I probably use it in heaavier air than I should, but I have a fractional rig and can really depower the main quite a bit.

Now, I have done some looking and have come across Challenge "pin stripe" sail cloth. It is a dacron woven cloth with aramid fibers woven in. It seems like maybe will hold its shape quite a while. Do any of you have any experience with this cloth.

Finally, looks are an issue. I do love the color of my oceanus sails and I hate the idea of sails not matching (but not enough to make me buy two sails at the same time).

Any thoughts at all on this delima?

[Ian McColgin]

Oceanus is a bit odd for most sailmakers who've not used it before. See if you can find someone who knows check that this was not caused by the tabling being sewn in a bit tight.

[Figment]

out of curiosity, what's the boat?

My sails are challenge cream dacron, though not the pinstripe, and I love em. I don't think you'd mind having a challenge main and an oceanus genoa. The visual difference would be more about the sheen at a low angle than the color.

I think you'll get what you pay for with the recut, which is to say that it'll be half the cost of a new sail, but will last half as long. All things are a compromise.

[peb]

out of curiosity, what's the boat?

My sails are challenge cream dacron, though not the pinstripe, and I love em. I don't think you'd mind having a challenge main and an oceanus genoa. The visual difference would be more about the sheen at a low angle than the color.

I think you'll get what you pay for with the recut, which is to say that it'll be half the cost of a new sail, but will last half as long. All things are a compromise.


I have no desire to spend 50% of the price for a new sail to get one that will last only a couple mroe years, I don't think.

Here is a picture of the boat:


http://www.imagestation.com/picture/sraid224/p9a162fd80c4fdaada6a7f05f08e3fb5b/ea99bbfe.jpg

[Figment]

Well, that "half the cost" assumes that they recut all the broadseams, vs. just refairing the luff.

There's one way to find out!

[Todd Bradshaw]

First of all, in my opinion, Oceanus is a very strange choice for sails for that boat. It isn't really aimed at the sloop market, especially those with fairly high aspect ratios. It sacrifices a heck of a lot of the stability you need to have for that nice soft hand - and sag and draft migration are most likely just a matter of time. As for the cupped leech, what's probably happening is that the double or triple thickness of the hemmed edge can't keep up with the stretch and sag of the single layer of fabric that makes up the rest of the sail, so it's proportionally tighter than it was when new and as a result, it's hooking the leech. This was also a problem back in the days of cotton sailcloth and one form of dealing with it was to employ a "reverse broadseam" when the sail was built. This meant that on the last few inches of panel seams at the leech, the panel-to-panel overlap was decreased slightly to ease the leech hem a bit. As the sail aged and stretched, this slightly-eased leech resisted hooking.

You might be able to have someone rip out the last 18" or so of three or four panel seams and ease the overlap as you approach the edge (it doesn't take an awful lot) re-hem it and lose the hook. As repairs/re-cuts go, this would be fairly simple and inexpensive. The other option would be to leave the leech alone and re-shape the panel seams from the leech hem to the middle to try to eat up some excess cloth and remove the bag. That's a lot of work and I would imagine a much trickier fix. It's hard to predict how well either of these would work or how long the shape would remain fixed.

Pinstripe is lovely stuff, but it strikes me as being just about as strange a choice on that boat as Oceanus is. To understand it, it helps to know a bit about Challenge Sailcloth - the company. Challenge specializes in woven sailcloth. For a long time, they avoided getting into the mylar-laminated sailcloth race and let Bainbridge, Dimension Polyant and North Cloth fight it out while they themselves concentrated on some really exotic and innovative variations of woven cloth. They do build some laminates today, but their woven cloth selection is their bread and butter and contains some really great specialty fabrics.

10-15 years ago, when the other companies were pushing mylar/scrim laminates and their stability, Challenge brought out the first generation of Pinstripe. It was a very firm, woven, hard-finished, racing Dacron with thin, dark (navy blue) aramid warp yarns woven into it about 1/4" apart. It actually looked like a pin-striped suit (except for the fact that it was white with blue stripes instead of banker's grey). The stripes gave it the same sort of warp-orientated stability for racing sails that other companies were producing with mylar laminates. The current generations of Challenge Pinstripe are similar, except the stripes are now either Spectra (white) or Kevlar (gold) and in addition to the 1/4" pin stripes, they've added a grid of additional cross-wise stripes about 1" apart. Like the original though, it is a warp-oriented fabric. Its most stable and stretch-resistant dimension is lengthwise - as it comes off the roll, not cross-wise like most Dacron. This means that it's ideally intended for radial sail constructions, not cross-cut sails where the stability added by the stripes would be largely wasted.

You could certainly put a set of Pinstripe radials on that boat and they should perform nicely, but if you're thinking about Pinstripe cross-cuts, it's a waste of money. You would be buying expensive Kevlar or Spectra stripes which will be pointing the wrong direction and you need to be talking to someone who knows more about modern sailcloth. You should also be aware that Pinstripe fabric is intended for high-performance (primarily racing) sails and is SERIOUSLY crunchy! Your Oceanus sails will seem limp as a dishrag by comparison and compared to Oceanus, Pinstripe is going to seem like plywood. For good sail life, you roll them, not fold them and you won't believe the noise that a flapping Genoa will make.

With all the good cruising and general-purpose fabrics out there from Challenge, Contender, Hayward, Bainbridge, North and DP, some of them aimed at pretty high performance, it seems likely that unless racing is truly your main thing, the choice of Pinstripe is just as odd as Oceanus was, but way over 180 degrees at the other end of the spectrum. I suspect you may be getting some bad advice.

[peb]

Todd, thanks for the information. I knew that the pinstripe was quite stiff. I wa told that it was targeted to the club racer who didn't want to spend the money or deal with the laminates, but wanted a sail that would hold its shape for several years. That seemed like what I was thinking about. My biggest concern is that I don't want to do this all over again in 3-4 years.

You're discription of the hook on the leech seems to be exactly what has happened. I will go by and visit with my local sailmaker next week and see what he says. What I am trying to do is figure out my cloth preferences ahead of time.

[Albatrosscanvass]

I agree with Todd! one thing you can try is to stretch the sail with lines to the tack and clew, and get a handy billy set up at the head do this with three tree's let it hang natural and work the handy billy and watch the cup in the sail if it reduces it, get a bucket of hot water and sponge it on and let it dry. It will hold the shape but only for a while! As Todd said, the panels are stretching more then the leech! Recutting is an option but the problem will come back only due to the nature of the fabric. One guy I call for these kinds of questions is the guy that cuts sail kits at sailrite.com He know's a lot about sails! Good luck!

[Todd Bradshaw]

Though it may look like cotton canvas, the water absorption figures for polyester fibers are very low (like a few percentage points). You can put hot water on it all day long and you may get some sitting on or around the fibers and some trapped between layers at the corners, but very, very little actually penetrating them and not enough to induce any kind of shape change. As soon as you remove the tension, it's going to start reverting back to what it was - unless of course you over-tension it, which is a great way to ruin a sail. Taking a block and tackle to a suspended sail is a very risky procedure and with modern fabrics it's likely to do little more than damage.

The sail's "stretch" in this case is most likely more a matter of loss of bias stability than a matter of the fibers actually elongating with age. Compared to it's flat two-dimensional profile, there is a fair amount of excess fabric in a sail and if the cloth loses it's bias stability (or doesn't have enough of it for that particular job to start with) that excess which originally was supposed to be providing a pre-determined shape and draft will start moving around and can cause various shape problems.

I doubt that it's the case here, but while we're on the subject it's worth noting that a shrunken boltrope (especially 3-strand) can do the same sort of thing and totally screw-up the shape of a sail. It gathers a lot of fabric along the luff and foot edges that's not meant to be there. The fabric itself will be just fine, but the draft gets deep and wanders aft and it's beyond the scope of the normal sail adjustment gizmos (halyard, outhaul, downhaul, etc.) to fix things or flatten-out the sail. The verdict is always that the sail is "blown-out" (a very over-used term and often improperly used) when just a bolt rope replacement with one that's long enough to let the edges spread out properly allows the old sail to revert back, close to it's original shape.

I think that this is a pretty clear case of picking the wrong fabric for the job. Oceanus is great stuff, but it was never intended to be a high performance cruising or club racing fabric (unless you happen to be racing your square-rigger). A re-cut may be able to cure some of the symptoms and get a bit better performance out of the sails, but it's not going to change their nature. Had they been built from one of the colored Dacrons like Challenge Egyptian Dacron, Contender Cream, Bainbridge Classic Cream or Hayward Sunwing U.V. in Egyptian Cream, it's more than likely that we would not be having this discussion. Though these fabrics don't have the cotton-like feel of Oceanus, the colors are quite good and they are all substantially more dimensionally stable. Lifespan of any of them in your area will most likely be limited far more by U.V. exposure than by any kind of stability loss or shape problem.

If you're willing to go with "Natural" colored Dacron (which is the actual term for plain white) the options are nearly endless and there is a range from relatively soft cruising fabrics all the way up to some really high-performance weaves. Understand though that like Pinstripe, most of these hard-finished racing fabrics are quite stiff, not much fun to handle and won't take a lot of abuse. Four years of serious club racing on them would be pushing the limits of their durability, if they even made it that long. Some of the cruise laminates might also be worth looking into. They contain mylar layers and woven scrims, but have light Dacron laminated on either one or both sides as an outer layer. They tend to be very stable, yet much softer and more durable than hard racing Dacrons.

In any case, should you eventually decide to replace the Oceanus sails with something more appropriate for your boat you really need to sit down with a sailmaker or two who really know fabrics and look carefully at the available options. I seriously believe that you can get what you're after in terms of good performance, good lifespan and reasonable handling with a high-quality, high-performance cruising Dacron or maybe a cruise laminate. Jumping off the deep end into racing fabrics strikes me as a mistake that may send you back to square one in another three or four years.

[Ian McColgin]

There's a german cloth that has little or nothing in the way of surface finish but has a high thread count very dense weave, closer fibres for a given weight of fabric than normal. This is said to be lovely to handle, far more bias-stabile than Oceanus and more long-lived than normal dacrons as it's the finish more than the threads that breaks down first in UV. It's especially wonderful for gaff shapes and I'm not sure of its utility in a highish marconi.

This is the stuff of that marvelous huge sail (about 1000 square feet or something such) on the big cat "Kathleen."

[Todd Bradshaw]

You don't even have to go to Germany to get fabric like that. Challenge makes one called High-Modulus SoftCloth from 4.93 oz. up through 9.03 oz. Then they go from 12 oz. up to 17 oz. with their similar "Tall Ships Fabrics". However, it clearly states in the catalog "Please Note: SoftCloth has little or no resin, so it will perform differently than highly resinated fabrics."

This is true of any such fabric with a soft hand, be it regular Dacron, Oceanus, Clipper Canvas or even spinnaker weight cloth (a running spinnaker can usually tolerate much softer cloth than a reaching spinnaker and still work reasonably well). The trick then becomes knowing where you can use a particular fabric and where you shouldn't and what, if any, shape or construction modifications are needed to get it to work properly. The stress patterns on big, wide sails (like gaffers) are much more spread out and much less concentrated in straight lines along the edges than are those for high-aspect 3-sided sails. They can get away with softer fabric where the Hi-A Marconi rig can not.

All I know about the boat here in question is what's in that little photo - but I see enough aspect ratio to tell me that any brand of unusually soft fabric is likely going to be a pretty bad choice. Very hard racing fabric would probably sail quite nicely, but it doesn't last very long and is a pain to handle. The best all-round answer is most likely going to be something in the premium end (cruise/race) of one of the regular resinated Dacron lines.

[Todd Bradshaw]

Gee, for just a moment there I even kind'a missed building high-aspect modern sails.... These things will pass. Think about lovely varnished wood. If I get desperate I can always go up in the attic. Somewhere up there is an unassembled, computer-plotted, Kevlar Cruise Laminate, bi-radial jib that's about 24' tall and under 7' wide from an old project. Maybe I should put it together, auction it off and reinvest the cash into other stuff....

[peb]

Todd, thanks so much for the time you have spent answering my question. I do have a local sailmaker who made my tiny heavy air jib (out of dacron, not oceanis, but I forget the actual cloth) and I was very pleased with the job. Of course, that sail only gets used 1/2 dozen times a year, but it seems to have been built well. I will visit with him next week after do a little bit more studying on my own.

Once again, thank you very much for your time.

BTW, I have plenty of varnish work on that boat to go with the high aspect rig.

[Figment]

Gee, for just a moment there I even kind'a missed building high-aspect modern sails.... These things will pass. Think about lovely varnished wood. If I get desperate I can always go up in the attic. Somewhere up there is an unassembled, computer-plotted, Kevlar Cruise Laminate, bi-radial jib that's about 24' tall and under 7' wide from an old project. Maybe I should put it together, auction it off and reinvest the cash into other stuff....

hmmm.... I've been kinda thinking about getting a blade... :)

[Nick C]

If your racing and expect to be a serious contender, face the music, your going to have to buy new sails every few years. Pay attention to the guys that win most of the races and do what they do.

The only other alternative is to be smarter than the other sailors, but this is only good enough for an occasional race where you can factor in tides, currents and wind shadows. Most people, including the best sailors don't take advantage of this stuff very well.