Batt-car systems for the main

[Celestialsailor]

Originally Posted by Cheechako

Delmarray, those external SS slides on SS track were the best non binding ones ever....

Mine were always jamming on my Ingrid...They were a real pain. Maybe I had different ones.

[cat man do]

I had and loved these B24 Lo Stak cars on my last boat
http://www.allyachtspars.com.au/cata...adercovers.pdf

No moving parts, no deformed or lost balls, cheap and the main used to almost fall up.

Dave

[Abaco]

Tropic1,

I have to agree with the comments regarding Strong Track. I used it on my 38 foot sloop and loved it. I plan to use it on my next boat as well. The lack of ball bearings and simplicity of the system is really nice.

[redcobra]

Love the Tides system. Have that with a Doyle Stackpack Main. Let the Halyard go, and bloop...into the cover she goes. Pull the zipper line and she is furled, covered and done!!

[s/v Jedi]

Originally Posted by redcobra

Love the Tides system. Have that with a Doyle Stackpack Main. Let the Halyard go, and bloop...into the cover she goes. Pull the zipper line and she is furled, covered and done!!

If you do that with the Harken system, you'll be hunting down bearing balls all over the deck ;-)

But come on guys, all these systems work well I think. It's just that I can't imagine many boats that really need ball bearing cars so I think many waste some money on those.

For us, choice was for low stacking height and that eliminates Harken immediately. The Antal system stacks low, works great without bearings so is also affordable. I did have to order adapters to connect my Battslides (now Schaeffer) to the Antal cars.

cheers,
Nick.

[Joli]

Harken does make a Y diverter so you can reduce stack height by half. We like the Harken Batt Cars, I'm not sure how well the sliders would work with our compression load.

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

If you do that with the Harken system, you'll be hunting down bearing balls all over the deck ;-)

But come on guys, all these systems work well I think. It's just that I can't imagine many boats that really need ball bearing cars so I think many waste some money on those.

For us, choice was for low stacking height and that eliminates Harken immediately. The Antal system stacks low, works great without bearings so is also affordable. I did have to order adapters to connect my Battslides (now Schaeffer) to the Antal cars.

cheers,
Nick.

[s/v Jedi]

Joli: We have huge roach full batten sails with 3/4" round solid battens (7 in the main, 6 in the mizzen), resulting in huge batten compression forces.

Up till recently we used the mast internal track with Battslide hardware. These slides were about 3" long. The intermediates were special Bainbridge slides that contact the tracks both on the inside and outside.

The trick to raise this is to loosen the boomvang which cancels the compression force. However, during sailing the forces are there and we had to replace intermediate slides often and the internal track was worn out causing jamming etc. It became a pain.

We selected the Antal 50 track that basically uses cars that are sliders, 50mm (2") high. The track is anodized aluminium and the sliders have new-tech inserts that contact the track and are very dense and slippery (teflon?). I do believe the inserts will wear out but that's much like the bearing balls on Harken and easy and cheap to replace. The main now stacks 80 cm high; the old setup stacked 84 cm high ;-) Antal isn't cheap but costs much less than Harken.

I am sure you like the Harken cars, they ought to be very good for the amount of money you have paid for them. And the uncontrolled lowering of sails (let go halyard!) is something to be avoided regardless of which system you have. But friends of ours had a little accident and the sail came down so fast and violent that they had a lot of damage (cars broke through the bottom stopper!). I think there will be boats that really need the harken system but I think they will have masts 100' high or more.

I never saw that Y diverter and wonder if it would work with our sails. I think that the first half of the sail will block the path for the second half.

cheers,
Nick.