Roller furler for Jib

[Lewisboater]

Last night at work I made a Roller furler for a Jib that I bought off FleaBay for $75.
The Sail is 14 ft on the leach, 12'9" luff and 5'9" foot (about 37 sf)



and has the following features:

Tack Thimble



Head thimble



and Battens...Battens?



I made the furler according to these instructions...sort of. http://navigatorjoel.blogspot.com/20...-under-40.html Instead of using the wood and stuff inside I made it all stainless steel except for the housing which is white PVC... off white now that it is all dirty. I'll put up some pictures Monday when I get it home...I still have to do a couple of final touches...bloody work interfering with the important stuff.

Somebody comment on the battens...in a Jib? I am not too familiar with jibs...having never used or owned one before but I don't recall ever seeing battens in any of the pictures of them I have seen.

Now I have to build a boat for my newly acquired piece of cloth

[Todd Bradshaw]

Battens are installed on jib luffs when there is roach present along the leech edge of the sail. Without them, the leech would flap like crazy. Standard procedure for most jibs is to cut the leech with a slight hollow, rather than a roach, which eliminates the need for any battens. If they're trying to cram a little bit of extra sail area into the jib, they sometimes add the roach and thus have to add the battens. In my experience, the "gain" in performance is tiny at best, if at all, and the PITA factor and potential for tedious little repairs goes up a lot faster than your boatspeed increase. A batten should be about three times as long as the amount of roach in that spot to prevent the entire leech hinging along the forward ends of the battens.

With a furler, you're obviously going to have some pretty bad lumps when you get the thing furled, and they tend to stress the areas around them. Rutgerson makes roller battens which look like two curved-cross-section hunks of a measuring tape, back to back in a sleeve (they roll up like a tape does) and some classes install the battens vertically so that they will roll with the sail. The problem with this is that they need to be quite long to get the roach-times-three horizontal span that is needed. Best bet on a furling sail is usually to pitch them and re-cut the leech with about 1" of hollow for every 8-10' or so of leech length.

You might also want to tie the luff wire tightly between two trees, stretch the cloth smooth and lump-free along the luff and lash the tack ring on the cloth to the lower wire eye. Some boats (like Stars and a few others) do have adjustable tension for both the wire and the fabric (gives more draft adjustability) but that's not really very practical on a furler and you might as well set it and forget it.

[Lewisboater]

Thanks for the info Todd. Should the center of the hollow be at the leach's center or more towards the top or bottom. There is a place nearby that sews awnings and boat covers...I expect they could sew a hem if I cut it to shape. I also like the set and forget idea... I forget a lot anyway so I really appreciate it when I can do it deliberately.

[Todd Bradshaw]

Normally, the hollow is centered pretty close to the middle of the leech, though it isn't terribly critical. On some boats it can be moved up or down a bit as needed to clear spreaders or other things.

[JimConlin]

On roller furled/reefed sails, battens need to be parallel with the luff, so they can roll up. Consequently they'll likely be at an acute angle to the leech, so they'll need to be much longer than if they were perpendicular to the leech. As they're carrying the same load over a greater span, they'll also need to be a lot stiffer.

Damfino's mainsail is roller reefing/furling and the roach is about 18". The battens are over 8' long and I finally had to make carbon composite battens to get the needed stiffness.

[Lewisboater]

Well... sorry for the delay...couldn't do anything Sunday night with it so I polished it off last night. Here is the furler... Parts, partially assembled, assembled and with a can for size comparison:











I should have broke out the TIG just for looks but I was lazy and used a stick instead. Not the greatest of welds but I was trying not to warp things too much...as it was I had some hammer work to do to flatten the cheeks of the drum after welding the centers. The whole thing is made from bits and pieces I scrounged at work plus a PVC pipe cap I had laying around.

Oh...and I went and bought another sail from fleabay...55 sf for $40 new!



http://www.ebay.com/itm/DAYTON-MARIN...item1e6f024bd2