"Do you have any thoughts Slieve?"

Silly question Paul, I stopped thinking years ago!

Actually it is not a silly question Paul. It is an extremely important one and one to which I wish I had the answer. This afternoon I tried to define the type and direction of flow over a yard angled at 30° and many words later have come to the conclusion that with the wide range of wind speeds and angles of attack we can really only guess what the flow is at the head of the sail at any one time.

I am convinced that the tip vortex is being pushed up along the yard at about 30° and exiting the sail right at the tip which is what is wanted and helps explain the rigs performance, and that would suggest Arne's latest double tube yards should be better than the earlier girder one I copied from him for Poppy, but as to which tube should be on top, my guess is the smaller one, but note the word 'guess'. Which ever, I suspect the difference will be minimum and not worth worrying about.

Cheers, Slieve.

6mm eyeplates, and M6 screws, I think. I don't suppose the shackles in your blocks will be any larger than that. If you have a 3:1 halyard and put two single blocks on two separate plates for it, it's a very reliable setup.

Yes, I'm happy going up the mast. 25mm screws with all their length fully threaded into nylon have immense holding power. Put them in with thread locking compound for extra peace of mind.

Paul
First of all, that new sort of yard ‘just happened’, back in 2012, on Edmond Dantes, since the aluminium supplier/welding shop, was about to go on holidays. I then just received the yard tube and a batten tube, and decided to try if it worked this new way. I reckoned that the main tube was almost strong enough, and the batten tube would only add some stiffness in the vertical plane. This is needed on cambered panel sails, since all the vertical loads move out to luff and leech.
This worked perfectly well, and since then I have rigged two more boats with that sort of yard (Frøken Sørensen and Ingeborg)

Actually, recently I have been pondering if I should turn the yard upside down, as you suggest. Before re-installing it, I would like to bandage it along its full length (I would probably just stitch on more of that PVC canvas I use at the mast. The foggy idea around this is that the 70° yard, which actually is a big part of the luff, would form a round wing-like leading edge, which would do some good to the sail.

I would encourage you to try it, yourself. I can see no structural problems with it, at least.

Cheers and good luck!
Arne

"Maybe my imagination, but it also seemed to heel less for similar speed when beating and was definitely less roll-ey in gusts on the downwind legs."

That was also my impression. I found that I was frequently over-canvased being still totally under control I just enjoyed going faster. Over-canvased didn't have the same meaning as control was maintained, but the speed was up against or above the displacement speed in a heavy non planing hull. I found it so easy to sail that I became a bit of a hooligan overtaking faster designs.

Great fun.

Batten rise.

When I built the Poppy rig I had enough new ideas to contend with so accepted what help I could get from the likes of PJR. By using 10° rise that could not be blamed if the rig didn't work. Since then I have questioned reducing to 0°, but have settled on 5° for a few of reasons.

• Aesthetics do come into it. We are used to seeing junk rigs with 10° so when I saw a photo of a split rig with zero rise I felt it looked odd and rather plain.

• With the desire the spanned downhauls not to get jammed in the blocks/ rings at the foot of the mast places the lowest batten is at least half a panel height above the deck. It is desirable for aerodynamic reasons to get the tack of the lowest jib as close to the deck as possible, so tilting the batten down from the mast places the tack that little bit lower. I suspect the gain is negligible, and more of a psychological sop to me.

• When I draw a sail with all battens parallel and just the yard at a steeper angle I find the angle between batten and yard of 35° looks a bit extreme, and feel the 30° extreme enough to get a good forward camber in the panel, remembering that this panel might be used alone in extreme conditions. As things now stand I'm drawing all rigs at 5° rise, and feel it doesn't look too bad.

• On smaller boats it may be necessary to give head clearance in the cockpit, and a little rise can ease things here.

The jib lens with batten rise is easy enough to draw. I just draw one combined lens for a middle batten with a half lens above and a half lens below and that's it. I cut just one main panel round and use it for top and bottom of each parallel panel. As has been said, a third worrying, a third thinking and then just make it.

Very early on when building the Poppy rig I started labelling each panel with its panel number and position in the rig (eg. 2 main centre ↑) in the bottom forward corner with an arrow pointing upwards, and always on the same side. As I was experimenting I think each panel had some different sail making method included so I couldn't afford to get things mixed up, and because of the consistent marking got away with it.

On another subject, someone recently sensibly suggested using a bar or rings at the foot of the mast to reduce the deck to rig distance, and let the line pull the downhaul spans through. I used rings on Poppy with no blocks and found them satisfactory. I never pulled the rig down with the downhauls, but simply set the rig and then took up the slack in the downhauls. There was no real tension involved.

Cheers, Slieve.