Saturday, September 15, 2007

Deck hardware notes

I've spent many hours recently studying deck hardware catalogs trying to figure out what I needed to install, etc. Much of this was simple education on sailboats in general. I now have a long list of items that are under consideration:

  • Mast-base sheaves, to rout halyards from the mast to the deck organizers.
  • Deck organizers, port and starboard, to run halyards (and jib sheets) back to winches.
  • Deck organizer, port, to run daggerboard lines back to cockpit. (if not combined with above item). (This is one advantage of the centerboard that I hadn't thought of: it removes some extra lines from the mess on the cabin top).
  • Stopper cleats in front of the winches for all of the above.
  • Spinnaker\screacher stuff? Still trying to understand what these need.
  • Fairleads to run jib furler lines back to the cockpit.
  • Docking cleats! Even I know that a single bow cleat just won't cut it. At a minimum, the aft cabin will get a cleat on each side. And I may do twin cleats on the bow, instead of one center cleat.
  • Boomless traveller -- I think this will need high density inserts as well, no?

[Edit: I asked Ian about the traveller; he said no inserts are needed for this it will be 100% bonded to the exterior glass.]

  • Mast loop raising attachment points aren't shown on the plans, but I bet they need inserts too.
  • Rotating mast? What does this need?

Another good resource I (re-)found was the F-boat Study Book; it contains several deck layout sheets from his bigger boats, allowing you to compare against the F22 to see what might be added. It's a great deal for $15 IMO.

Anyway, after all of this studying I finally decided that I wasn't going to design a perfect, finalized deck layout in just a day or two. So it would be better to just keep moving on with the hull construction, and add inserts later on as needed. Yesterday afternoon I bogged between the deck and gunwale planks. The marked rectangle in this picture...

...is the outline of the poptop cutout -- notice there's not much room left between the jib track and the poptop for routing lines, so the deck organizers will likely be slightly forward and outboard from the jib tracks.

I was disappointed to see how much bog was needed to attach the bottom edges of the 3/4" deck planks. It would have been much better to miter these at an angle to minimize the gaps.

2 comments:

DMTim said...

Careful with the mast base sheaves - almost anything you see in catalogs will be for non-rotating masts. Make sure it'll work without restricting the mast rotation before you get to ordering it.

If I had to guess, the mast will sit on a ball mounted on top of a post - this seems to be the method of most modern rotating masts.

Jay said...

Good point, thanks TJP. I did notice that it is only recently that monohulls seem to be getting into the rotating mast thing.

Jay