Gallic fishing boat St Gildas

AllanKP69 said:
Sorry, I forgot that you are in Tokyo. How about silk?? :) Actually I have not seen any silk sails, but wonder how that would work. For me, if I was in Japan and that did not work out I would console myself with some toro and uni while sipping some Junmai Ginjo sake.


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Allan
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You are not wrong. Unfortunately, all my money is going into a new house at the moment, so we'll see how much is left for the fun stuff. Luckily there is a yakitori restaurant just around the corner from the new place! We're right on the Tama river and all its cherry trees, so I'm really looking forward to cherry blossom season.
 
Five of the six sails are more or less done.
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The two on the top need to be dyed brown and the two on the bottom will be dyed red. The one in the center, like the as-yet-to-be-stitched mainsail, while remain white. After dying, bolt holes and reefs to be added.
 
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Having to wait on dying fabric so I’m forging ahead with the white sails. I’m not sure whether the correct term for attaching a bolt rope to a sail is ‘bending’ or ‘seizing’, but whatever the actual process is, I’m sure it bears no resemblance to what I’ve been doing. After about two hours, I’ve finished with the smallest of the six sails
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I used fly-tying thread to attach the bolt rope and it’s practically invisible, it’s so thin. But the stuff has a mind of its own and is extremely difficult to work with. I still have much learning to do in order to avoid repeating my manifold mistakes on the larger sails.
 
I could claim work and other 1:1 activities haven’t left much bench time available (which would be mostly true), but the truth is I’ve been putting off the tedious task of sewing boltropes to the sails. I think I just need to get started and try to do a bit at a time.

I did manage to dye the sails, which is something I’ve never tried before.
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I would have liked to have achieved a deeper red, but I’ll take it. I do like the contrast created by the polyester thread, which resisted the dye.

Booms, gaffs and spars are nearing completion and then I can start rigging. Looking at the plans, there are a lot of lines that don’t seem to actually go anywhere or make sense. Hopefully once sails are bent and masts stepped some of it will start to make sense in three dimensions.
 
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Once I finally got a system down for stitching the boltropes to the sails it proved to be not so tedious as I had feared. In fact I got in such a groove, I had stitched clear past the reefs before I remembered I was supposed to sew in cringles at the reefs.
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I have some ideas on how I can recover from that, but tearing out the stitching and redoing it is not one of them. Other ideas are welcome.
 
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The last step before the mainsail can be bent to the mast is adding the reefs
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To do the reefs, I gave a length of thread a light coat of PVA glue. Once dried, I cut it into pieces twice the length of the reefs then bent them in the middle. The tricky part is using an airbrush needle to make a hole where the reef goes and then insert the reef before the hole closes up. About 2mm down from the hole I go through the sail with white fly-tying thread, then back through on the other side of the reef. On the back side of the sail I tie a double overhand knot in the ends of the fly-tying thread, then another one. Lastly, trim the thread off close (fly-tying thread is so fine you can barely see the loose ends. 9 down, 48 to go.
 
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Having finished off the reefs on the mainsail, it was time to bend it to the mast
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Although white thread would probably be more accurate, I used black instead because I liked the contrast between the wood-tone hoops and the white sail.

Since the running gear added to the mast previously would prevent me from sliding the hoops and boom on at this point I knew the boom wood be a challenge. After some thought, I drilled holes through each side of the boom yoke (jaw?), and then made a small slit in one of those. (Apologies for the rough, unfinished appearance of the boom. The wood with which I am working is pretty soft stuff. It looks a lot better at normal viewing distance.)
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One end of the brass wire gets inserted into the hole, then after adding the parrels, the other end slides into the slot. The parrels are tiny glass beads.
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And because overkill should have been my middle name, I then glued a couple of small slivers of index card into the slot. Those will get trimmed after the glue dries and should keep everything from coming apart.

Once I finish up the gaff and get that installed, I think I'll just about be ready to step the mast.
 
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Great solution for attaching the boom. Your sails look great also. One question - what is the purpose of the cringles along the luff if not to attach the hoops to?
 
RussF said:
Great solution for attaching the boom. Your sails look great also. One question - what is the purpose of the cringles along the luff if not to attach the hoops to?
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Thank you for you kind words.

It took me awhile to puzzle out the cringles, but I believe those are where the sail would be attached to the boom when reefed. They are not aligned with the reefs in order to avoid putting stress on the reefs. I think the hoops would have been bent directly to the boltrope, but I went into the sail itself slightly to keep from ripping things apart.
 
Namabiiru said:
Thank you for you kind words.

It took me awhile to puzzle out the cringles, but I believe those are where the sail would be attached to the boom when reefed. They are not aligned with the reefs in order to avoid putting stress on the reefs. I think the hoops would have been bent directly to the boltrope, but I went into the sail itself slightly to keep from ripping things apart.
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You are correct. A little more research on my part bore that out. I knew cringles are used at the corners for attachment to booms and spars as well as for tack and clew lines. I think they can be used on the leech to help shape a sail as well. I just didn't realize they are also used for reefing. I am still learning.
 
Only a smattering of bench time during the past week. Over the weekend, I headed west with a friend to hike one of Japan's 100 famous mountains, but in spite of being able to hike in T-shirts and sunscreen, we had not counted on the amount of snow remaining in late April and, not having brought the appropriate snow gear with us, we were forced to turnaround before we reached the summit. o_O Guess we'll have to give it another go next year.

Today we went to a bamboo forest to gather bamboo shoots. For those of you who have only ever had the kind of bamboo shoots that come out of a can, you don't know what you're missing. ;)

Did manage to finish the boltrope on the driver. I am an abominable seamstress, but in spite of my terribly inconsistent stitchery, I like the look of the off-white boltrope against the dyed sail. Makes a huge difference to my eye. Good choice dying the sails before moving on.
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