shroud protection

[adriano meis]

in order to prevent main sail damnage, i'm thinking to put the shroud inside a sort of plastic water pipe? Is this correct?

[Ralf]

Have you considered the extra wind resistance that this will cause? I have just measured my garden hose and it is 1.5cm thick on the outside. Now do the math for 4 shrouds of 10 meter length: 0.015x10x4=0.6 square meters of area. Imagine to hold a plywood board of 1x0.6meters into the air in a more or less strong wind. That is the extra windage you produce and your boat will have to produce the energy to overcome this windage before it can move a single meter. I always find that sailboats have so little to give away in power that I would avoid it. I would go for cloth tape on the mainsail where it touches the shrouds. Just my thoughts. Enjoy the day

Ralf

[adriano meis]

actually in the competition paraglider le lines are thiner. weaker, but faster. you make me think

[Rory McDougall]

Adriano,

On a Tiki rig the mainsail does chafe on the shrouds when you are sailing on a reach. On Cookie years ago I made up old fashioned baggy wrinkle protection and had 'woolly sheep' in the rigging at the position of the mainsail seams!! It worked well for chafe but had the problem that the loose leeward shrouds tangled around each other! Last year I bought plastic rigging guards that are made for the job and fitted them only to the aft shrouds and only the top 2/3rds of the shrouds. This works brilliantly and was easy to fit as the plastic guards were made for 4mm wire and have a split to make fitting easy. The extra windage of these low profile guards is negligible. Hope this helps.

Rory

[Rory McDougall]

Adriano,

I just uploaded a photo of Cookie that shows the shroud chafe guard when you enlarge the photo. Very neat and clean and easy to fit. There is no need to have a chafe guard on the whole length of the wire - just where needed.

Cheers Rory

[adriano meis]

did you buy these plastic rigging guards in a common ship chandler od did you build them

[Rory McDougall]

Adriano, here is a link to buy from a chandlery in UK - http://marinestore.co.uk/PBED-SC253.html

I used 2 x length on each shroud.

Cheers, Rory