Oké, this was a beautiful Sunday. First we (the Admiral and I) started the day with a bike ride, 42km/26 miles, on e-bikes, to be frank.
In the afternoon the Admiral saw Hamilton crash into Verstappen (or the other way around, I wouldn't know, LOL) and I continued adding rope hanks and coils to the deck and no, I'm not going to share any pictures yet, first the earlier parts of my journey.
So I had the masts united with the hull again. I drilled the holes for the masts in the decks in accordance with the imprinted diameters on the decks. These holes were slightly larger than the diameters of the masts. This meant I had to fiddle with the shrouds and stays to get the orientation of the masts right. Combine that with the difficulties in getting the shrouds having some tension ánd the desire to get the pitch between the lower- upper deadeyes more or less the same, you're bound to run into trouble.
And that's what I did. It took endless tweaking, doing and redoing the lanyards of the deadeyes, starting again on some of the shrouds and, I must admit, the use of some colorful language. I'm glad no one was around...
Detail of main mast shrouds, deadeyes and lanyards,after changing to Mantua ropes | Detail of foremast shrouds, deadeyes and lanyards, after changing to Mantua ropes |
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In the end I was quite happy with the results; it looks indefinitely better than the original installation with plastic deadeyes. So all shrouds, top and bottom done, up to the next topic... Nope, not gonna happen yet. It was at this point that I definitely got dissatisfied with the BB supplied ropes; they were simply to fluffy, even after using bees wax. So I ordered, after some looking around, some Mantua ropes, in diameters as close as possible to the BB specified rope diameters.
Since I already had some experience with installing the lanyards through te deadeyes, this was fairly easily accomplished. Too bad I couldn't get rid of some remnants of the old ropes, out of fear for damaging the shrouds. I completed the standing rigging by adding the ratlines on the lower shrouds, the upper hrouds were already provided with those lines.
Everyone, who has ever gone through this process, knows how elaborate this task is, yet you have to stay focused. I simplified the knots I used, at least I didn't dare go to the knots as advocated and used by, amongst others,
Dean62 on his POF Bluenose build log.
The installation of the stays was pretty straightforward, at least no surprises there, other than, again, it required a lot of tweaking and fiddling to get the tension right, simultaneously making sure the orientations of the masts were correct. Strategy of the day; measure once, measure twice, check and check again!
After completing the installation of the standing rigging, it was time to proceed with the installation of the two jibs and the forward stay sail and the installation of the running rigging.
