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Knut

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  • Birthday 01/01/1

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  1. Very nice work indeed and I am sure dimensioning and attachement to the spar will work fine. One very different consideration from my side is the overall stability of the boat. If you are alone in the boat and there is no special weight or ballast involved and a normal weight adult person moves all the way out on such a grate, the bow will dip quite deeply. The stern will lift and the sideways stability will be seriously reduced. Not to say that it cannot be done, but personally I would definately not go that far forward in open water (which you may have to, with a roller furling device at the end of the bowsprit).
  2. Hi, great details on the sideways swing of the boom at the gooseneck end. I just wonder about the vertical movement of the boom :?: Have I missed something, or are you adding a feature to allow this :roll: :?:
  3. Bruce, hilarious :!: :!: :!: :!: I laughed so much I had to stop reading so I could get the tears out of my eyes to continue reading. It all reminded me a lot about the tricks my brother and me invented, sometimes with the good help of our friends. Thanks for the laugh
  4. I had in principle the same arrangement as Phil, with a cleat on the underside of the boom just behind the block. I used a normal straight jam-cleat and the sheet tail would jam sufficiently that it could hang straight down from the cleat by the friction in the cleat. Advantage being that for a quick release I only had to give it a very small tug in almost any direction with a down-component and the sheet was immediately free. There are lots of situations and conditions where this arrangement is good and safe. During a few hours of sailing I can promise that there will be many necessary tasks to perform that are easier to execute if you do not have permanently one hand on the wheel and one on the main sheet. Like scratching your back, drinking water, finding your sunglasses :roll: and handling your sandwhiches.
  5. Jan, if you have a lapper jib (large enough to reach back to aft of the mast) you may well go sailing with jib alone if there is a decent wind. With the stock jib you will quickly get bored since the driving effect of this sail alone will feel like close to nothing. By the way, sailing on jib alone will NOT increase the weather-helm and force the bow up in the wind. On the contrary, the tendency will be the opposite. On mainsail only, the weatherhelm will be more pronounced than when you also have a jib set. If you feel uncomfortable with the wind conditions (too strong for taste and experience), the best approach is to reef the main one or two steps and keep the jib up. The boat handles much better with a jib and you get good speed with very limited heel even in strong wind. Especially going upwind on mainsail alone gives lousy performance. Congratulations on the beautiful boat and thanks for the action pictures.
  6. Stump, my WE had raised full length coamings, but this was not enough to allow bailing after righting. Also, if you have the standard wheel steering, the hole in the transom will be under water and you will not be able to bail faster than the inflow through this opening. A standard WE is as close to impossible to bail in the water as you can get. In my opinion, this is by far the single most important negative aspect of the WE design since it has to do with safety. (Basically, there are no other negative aspects at all!!). What to do? Build in floatation and full length coamings (and mount a watertight jacket on the tiller transom opening if you have one) to ensure that the righted boat floats high enough that you can bail it in the water. Watertight compartments in the bow (with a tight fitting hatch!) and behind the seats + the lazarette (with tight hatches), is probably the simplest and best solution as described by Ray. Without the ability to bail the boat in the water, the only safe way of using it would be by severely limiting distance to land or by making sure that external help would be available if needed (especially at low water temperature). Even with tested and verified bailing capability, you have to consider where you go, who is in the boat (kids, not so fit persons etc) and you have to practice the recovery under real conditions. As a note in this respect: Even with very good added floatation, there will be a limit on wave height above which bailing will not be possible. Don't take this as an attempt at scaring anyone or reducing the fun of operating a WE or Vacationer. However, there is no substitute for being realistic and prepared once you are on the water. Have fun
  7. Great story Tim. One of those posts that make me come back here all the time. An unpleasant knot in the wrong place on the main sheet could really turn into a nasty surprise, especially with a fresh helmsman. Good to hear that you saved the situation. You mentioned that further reefing would have been good to have when the wind was piping the most. No surprise to me that such an idea crossed your mind. A thunder squall had me in similar conditions for a short while and reefed main and the jib dropped was still too much sail. One further step you can take in a pinch (as you certainly know, but did not mention) is to lower the peak and scandalize the upper part of the main. This would even work with a knot in the mainsheet! Thanks a lot for the story.
  8. As one of the "lost sons" now operating a plastic :oops: boat I have to say that I still enjoy following what is going on on messing-about.com I also see that I am not the only one bringing up issues outside of Stevensen Projects boat design and building, even discussing plastic boats and we all know that the subject spread is quite large when all extremes are taken into consideration. I don't personally feel there is anything wrong with that. If there is something posted of minor interest, I can always skim quickly by and look at the rest. The name of the site "messing-about" is also quite wide, even though I imagine the name was not meant to be indicative of the scope of subjects that can be discussed :?: :?: (There are too many ways of messing about) In any case, the Main Forum today gets almost all the postings. Why, because that is where the action is :!: :!: A different forum may, or will end up like the other Forums, dropping out of the public eye because everybody is gravitating back to the Main Forum again. I would very much support what Tim said about properly using the Subject line. It may be wishful thinking and there may be no good way of nudging people in the right direction here: Stay with the subject at the start of the string and add a new Subject if you feel it is needed:!: If we could succeed in making that happen, we could keep it all in the Main Forum and it would be much easier to sort what you want to read and what not. It would also help tremendously in later searching for specific information. As said, I don't know how to make it happen, but with all the clever souls attending, may be some good idea may pop up :idea: :?:
  9. Tim, thanks a lot. I was on to it, but found that it did not work if the picture reference was to my own harddisk! So, find a website where the picture can be deposited and then it should work That was not so difficult after all. It is easy when you know how :shock: as they say.
  10. I know this has been covered before, but I am too slow to grasp the details. :oops: How do you do it (in detail please, and NOT a picture attachment, since that is working fine)?? :?:
  11. I meant to include a picture, but forgot. Here it comes as a late bonus. I don't know if this works, so I use attachment as well?? [attachment over 4 years old deleted by admin]
  12. Actual size is 96 sqf or a 112% jib.
  13. As most of you know I built and sailed FreeAtLast and established that the Weekender was not suitable for my use around the Florida Keyes. I then sold the Weekender in Nov. 03 and bought a Balboa 20 (plastic :oops: ). Executed restoration covers the deck which now looks like new + re-embedding hardware and filling some old holes etc. Next step is repainting the hull, but not until the Florida temp. drops a bit. Otherwise, I am sailing as much as possible. This report from 6 August was sent to Barnacle Bill and is copied for information: Today we had quite a good sail, going 24.3 nautical miles in total with an average of 4.5 knots. Going from Matheson Hammock to Soldier Key we had a nice broad reach and good wind and made from 4 to 6.4 knots. Very nice going. Returning upwind turned out to be quite a task. The wind picked up and with the main reefed to the first batten, the jib was still too big. We got overpowered. I had to improvise a reef by lowering the jib and tightening down the lowest hank with a line. Far from optimal since our upwind pointing was as much as 60-70 degrees to the wind. We could go higher with the main alone, but then with very little speed. Later on, we had to get the jib up full again and we had 1 to 2 hours of sailing close hauled with the rub-rail in the water to be able to get back to our launch at Matheson Hammock. Great sailing for 5h 30 min. I see that I need a smaller jib to balance a reefed main when the wind gets up above 20 knots. For practical reasons and when the wind is strong but less than 20 knots I think a reef point in the jib should work well. I am going to install and see how it works out. The boat behaves very well in a seaway and she is quite fast. It may be possible to squeeze out 6.5 to 7 knots, but today 6.4 was maximum. Going upwind, she is not so stiff, so sail shortening will actually give more speed (or the same) with much less heel. Especially when the wind is gusty, like today, this will be a good approach. Thunder squalls are quite unpredictable, so it pays off to be a little on the safe side to avoid being knocked down. (Reef point in jib now installed, 65% jib ordered. Testing remains ).
  14. The plastic rubrails I used were fixed directly onto the existing upper wood rubrail. Unless you have narrower than normal wood rubrails it is easy to find a dimension slightly narrower than your existing rubrail. The advantage of mounting on top is that the contact point between dock and boat moves away from the hull side by the thickness of the plastic rubrail. This gives added margin against direct contact if the boat is heeling and bobbing in passing waves or for whatever other reason. It will be no problem to fix such a rubrail along the keel and I am sure it will work as an excellent protection. What I am not so sure about is friction if the boat rests on the keel against rough ground or for that matter on the trailer. Probably this will be no problem, but without experience I would not promise anything. The simple and reliable solution for the keel is one extra hardwood batten. I used 1" thickness oak screwed to the keel using 3M5200 in the holes to avoid letting water into the keel. The oak-batten was only treated with deck oil. Because of the oil it was always sliding easily on most substrates and the wear was quite limited. Upkeep is also very simple: Just brush on some oil once and a while. If the protection becomes a little bit beaten and "hairy" it is no problem at all. Does not show anyway when the boat is in the water. The plastic rubrail sinks and will contribute as ballast (marginally!). The one I used is 1" wide, 1/2" thick and had a 1/8" lip along one edge that I let go around the upper edge of the wood rubrail.
  15. Craig, I let go of my binder with the boat with all materials catalogues and other documentation, so I don't have it at hand any more. But it should be pretty easy to find in the West Marine website or in their catalogue. Probably also other sources available. Basically their rub-rails consist of a main plastic strip with a number of different profiles (thickness, width, symmetric, assymetric, with a lip on one side etc) that you fix to the boat using SS wood screws. They have all a profile groov where you enter the screws, which is also the channel (groov) where you insert a smaller plastic hose (about 1/2"). This hose is often in a contrasting color and it covers the screws so they don't show and more importantly, they don't hook into anything when the boat slides along a dock. They come in a range of dimensions, colors and contrast colors and by the foot, or in sets for boats of different length. I found the plastic rubrail easy to install and I did not have a single scratch in the paint afterwards. Before, there would be a patching point somewhere after every trip. Well worth the cost and effort in my opinion.
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