Home Built Roller Furling

[medicrene]

Has anyone ever built their own roller furling. I have a Hudson Force 50 and I just can't afford to buy a roller furling. I have not had luck finding used ones in Hawaii either. Any suggestions?

The Witchdoctor

[Bully]

Try furlings.com.au for a refurl unit, good price for a basic charter style furler.


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[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by medicrene

Has anyone ever built their own roller furling. I have a Hudson Force 50 and I just can't afford to buy a roller furling. I have not had luck finding used ones in Hawaii either. Any suggestions?

I've seen plans for a homebrew furler, using conventional hardware, but these were all for boats 16 to maybe 25 ft, and most relied on just twisting the luffwire, and didn't have the rigid sail foil or whatever the aluminum extrusion is called. I can't imagine where to get the extrusions, machined drum and heavy-duty bearings and such for the headsail of a 50 ft boat...

Besides the furling unit itself, you will need a sail for it, or have to get your current sail modified for the furler, including a sunguard.

I don't think 'inexpensive' and '50ft sailboat' often occur in the same sentence...

[Viking Sailor]

Originally Posted by medicrene

Has anyone ever built their own roller furling. I have a Hudson Force 50 and I just can't afford to buy a roller furling. I have not had luck finding used ones in Hawaii either. Any suggestions?

The Witchdoctor

Here might be a place to start/get an idea for DIY roller furling:

http://sbo.sailboatowners.com/images/kb/pdf/124.pdf

And here is another bit of info:

http://www.longpassages.org/Document...20Brochure.pdf

Let us know how it works out for you.

[Jim Cate]

You might have a look at these furlers Reefurl Roller Reefing Roller Furling Systems. They are not as sophisticated as the harken/profurl/etc lot, but they are much less expensive and they do work. for the budget minded they are a viable option.

Jim

[Schooner Chandlery]

What's driving towards wanting it so much? We thought we'd end up putting a furler in place (big bowsprit) but ended up just using a good combination of downhaul (line to the head of the jib) and tricing line (lets you spill the wind from the sail quickly as it gathers the clew up towards the jibstay if you need it. It's going on 5 years and lots of ocean miles w/o a furler. Works fine. We do have to be clever about bringing down the sail and tying it into the bowsprit netting in a blow. But--there are other ways to bring a sail inboard and deal with it. If money's an issue and you don't find a good used furler (Force 50's a big boat needs a good furler) you can do as we do. Oh--and our boat's about the same size as a Force 50, but schooner rigged rather than ketch.

[medicrene]

The push for the roller furler is becuase I frequnetly single hand the boat. I don't like being on the bow, in large waves trying to take down the jib solo.

[Snowpetrel]

A mate built a few nice one along the lines of a reefurl http://www.furlings.com/system/ he added an aluminum jamb cleat at the top to lock the halyard. Got to find a source of the extrusions. He had them extruded for him using a standard small dinghy mast die. Got enough 6 meter sections to make 100 furlers for half the price of a commercial version. Use electrical conduit for bearings. Inside the foil and hdpe for the lower and upper bearings.

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[newhaul]

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[Snowpetrel]

here's a good way to make a foil section using two welded together alloy tubes, one is cut to act as the bolt rope track. simple halyard return system as well. Brent Swain has details on how to make these.

[hoppy]

Why not contact all of the local rigging companies and ask them to contact you when they have a customer upgrading their furler.




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[Schooner Chandlery]

You'll find something that works for you, I hope. There's always more than one way to go about things though. You could rig yourself a Laurent Giles Dyarchy forestay with a couple good blocks and some Dyneema and bring the whole thing inboard and easy to control (see page 80 of Hand Reef and Steer by John Leath) something that I think is clever to do w/o putting yourself into having a furler.

But if anyone is really short on money (none for the dyneema and some good blocks) and likes their existing hanked on sails--really, REALLY--if I can take down our jib solo (our boat is similar size and should have similar jib sizes), you can do it (that is take down a hanked-on sail by yourself, on the bow, big boat, all alone.) and it's not that bad, really. I'm a woman, I have NO sense of balance/coordination, I'm not that strong, our jibs range from 200 sf to 400 sf and I can do it alone.

We have an 11 ft bowsprit. Nobody wants to go out on an 11 ft bowsprit alone to get that sail in in big seas. That 'sprit is up, down, all over and you're hanging on for dear life when you're out there. There's no bow pulpit so you don't just saunter out there (see photo below) so we have to have a way to get the jib down safely and easily. The ticket is to NOT go out there.

You don't have to go out there IF you have rigged a downhaul (our case 3/8" line) to the head of the sail so you can pull down your sail with it. If you don't happen to have someone else aboard who's going to keep your jib sheet the right amount of tight as you use one hand to loosen up the halyard and the other to haul down on the sail, then you just have to make sure you've also got that tricing line rigged. Both hands are busy, so you've either wedged yourself against the mast or you've plopped down on the deck (my style) to enjoy pulling strings.

This tricing line is a line that goes from the clew of your sail onto a ring on the jib stay positioned about 1/2 way between head and tack along the luff of the sail. On smaller boats, it's an elegant solution to rig a combined tricing line and downhaul (line goes from top of sail, down to the ring, out to the clew on one side the sail, through it, back to the ring and then down to a shackle or turning block at the base of the jibstay then on back to your control spot at your mast or pin rack -- you ease up on your jib sheet letting it out and you pull on that trice/downhaul combo line and first thing that happens is your clew gets pulled over to the jibstay and then after that's tightening up, you've let go your jib sheet (since your clew is under control with the trice) and then ease off on your jib halyard. *Note, your trice line can come all the way back to your cockpit if you're so inclined to have it there like your furling line at the ready. Won't furl your sail, it will just pull it tight up to the jibstay and depower it. Then you'd still have to release your jib halyard and pull your downhaul. In theory, you could do ALL of this from your cockpit, but we don't have our jib halyard rigged back to the cockpit so we just this from the foredeck.

Now your combined line starts pulling down on the sail and next thing you know, the sail's sitting in an amazingly small, tight bundle on the bow (or in our case, bowsprit) and you were standing next to the forward most mast pulling on strings the whole time. In our case, that's 11+16 ft = 27 ft back from that jibstay on the end of the 'sprit. A nice comfy spot compared to being on the 'sprit itself. Now I mentioned "on smaller boats" because it's really easier to have the downhaul and tricing line be two different lines as the sail size increases. With 2 lines, you get to secure your trice before you start your downhaul if you're doing this on your own with no help. If you've got a partner, you just have them keep a tension on your jibsheet and you'll be able to secure it in a roll along your foredeck or the bowsprit net if the weather's not too rough. When rough, just make that little bundle on the 'sprit work for you.

You can take down the sail on any point of sail using this technique. You can already put up the sail on your own just by making sure you're tailing the jib as you haul up the sail.

1st pic shows the lengthy bowsprit, second pic shows the tight bundle made with tricing then downhauling the jib (of course, we've thrown another line around it while we anchor over night.)

[Schooner Chandlery]

Finally--wire luff furlers. If you've got your heart set on furling and you've got a little more money than just buying a couple 3/8" lengths of line, you can get a wire luff furler and use it. They tend to be less costly than foil systems and they're better performance, to boot.