sail slides

[Martin O'Halloran]

I'm new to sailing so please bear with me.
I want to know how many sail slides are used per foot of sail. Have done a search but no info. found

[Todd Bradshaw]

There is no specific formula for slide and hank placement, though something about 26" apart is probably the most common. This is likely a throw-back to the old days when sailcloth was made in narrower widths as it tended to put them at the panel seams where the grommets they were attached to would be anchored into the extra layers caused by the seam overlaps. Luff/halyard tension created between the head and tack corner rings should be doing most of the work, so the slugs, slides or hanks aren't under an incredible amount of strain. I generally place them in the 22"-26" apart range depending on what gives the most even spacing along the luff. Sometimes there are also good reasons to adjust the positions (even of individual slugs in the group) in order to work better in relation to reef lines or other stuff on the mast. It's not a bad idea to put two of them into the head patches up top on mainsail luffs, 4"-6" apart to help handle the pull from leech tension and on small dinghies where the luff is pretty short, 26" spacing looks awfully sparse and you may want to shorten the spacing up to as little as 12" or so. It's really not all that critical, but remember that more slides cause more friction when raising or lowering sail and a taller stack of slides on the mast when furling and putting on the boom cover.

[George.]

None, if you lace the sail to a wooden mast...

[Trog]

Martin, I hope you don't mind if I jump in with a semi-related question...

Is there a particular trick to attach the sail to the slides, or "cars", with thread?

A prior owner to myself just took sail thread and looped it a bazillion times through the sail and slide. Seems overly loose and inefficient to me, the looseness appears to offer more abrasion to the thread than other potential tying methods.

[Todd Bradshaw]

You use waxed thread and do go around a whole bunch of times but you then seize it down with a few cross stitches - around the bundles of thread and through the sail like those shown here:
http://www.imagestation.com/picture/sraid87/pfc7b300f2a3c9a30c1879cd1f80005a0/faa3d761.jpg

You can also do it with a short chunk of webbing, wrapped a couple times through the grommet and the bail on the slide and then seize that through the sail with cross stitches.

[Trog]

Well now. That's pretty darn close to what I was imagining. But I didn't think to stitch to the sail, itself.

Thanks!