Sail loft getting ready

Here is a glimpse of the sail loft. A nice little yellow spare room.


I purchased three sail kits (main, jib and storm jib) from a sail maker. These kits have all the hardware and materials (fabric, thread, twine, rope, wire ... everything I need) and instructions to assemble them. I just need to sew the sails together (mostly machine sewing but some hand sewing at the corners) and attach the hardware. The sail fabric is already cut out. For those of you not familiar with sail design, the sail maker designed the sail panels with curved edges so that when they are sewn together they will form an airfoil shape. (Not something I can learn to design without sail design software.)

I'm going to try to sew tough sail fabric with a cheap little Singer sewing machine from Target. I'll let you know how it goes. The sail fabric is called Dacron, a surprisingly tightly stitched, plastic-like polyester fabric (kinda like Nylon, only much more stiff). I have to learn how to use the machine before I can sew the sails. The stitches of my first sail will probably look bad, but hopefully I'll get a hang of it. I'm going to make one sail (the jib) just to make sure that I can do it, then get back to building the boat. After the boat is closer to completion, I'll make the other two sails.

But first, I made a full-size pattern of the sails for the day when I want to make replacement sails. (Talk about thinking ahead, right?) The sail maker was kind enough to give me a computer print-out of the X,Y coordinates that he used to cut the sail panels out with a large automated plotter. I typed these coordinates into AutoCAD to draw the panels exactly to the correct shape. Then I just printed them out superimposed on each other on 30in x 112in paper. Here is a pic of the sail pattern with one of the sail panels lying on top of it to make sure that it matches. It matches perfectly of course.


Here are the coordinates of that sail panel and the resulting CAD drawing. Confused? If so, don't feel bad, it took me awhile to figure out what these coordinates meant.


I figure I paid the design fee so the design is mine. When I make some replacement sails in like 10 years, I'll just have to buy the materials.

You can't call me a sail maker since I'm clueless about sail design, but I guess you can call me a "sail assembler", kinda like the Chinese workers that most sail lofts outsource to nowadays.