Rod Rigging Tension

[HeinSdL]

Here is a question for those in-the-know on the topic of rod rigging.

I needed to replace my standing rigging this last winter due to length of service and used a reputable rigging company in Italy to make the new rods, fit them to the mast & spreaders and then tension/tune the rig. I wasn't super happy with the attention to detail while this work was ongoing so I decided to educate myself on this topic so as not to have to rely only on their work.

Rig details: 3 spreaders, discontinuous rod rigging, meaning different sized rods as follows:
V1 9.5mm
V2 8.4mm
V3/D4 7.1mm
D1 8.4mm
D2 7.1mm
D3 6.5mm

First thing I learnt was I need a decent tension measurement device and the ones made by Loos are on the whole considered pretty good. Second thing was that V1 should be tightened to the max possible and D1, D2 and D3 can be a bit tighter than hand tight. Third, on my particular boat things can be pretty tight due to transmission of forces below decks being taken care of by the galvanized frame lying in the bottom of the boat.

This is what I found in terms of how much tension was put on V1, see image below.

(Will try to turn the image at some point. Units on this device seem a bit messed up, I bought the metric version but main indicators are in inches. Not so critical though, the inches and mm's match in size)

Almost off the scale meaning 30-35% of breaking strength on V1. Now for V1 I am not so worried about it getting stressed too much but I also see that D2 and D3 are pretty slack (I will go up the mast later today to take up that slack) so the tension that V1 is seeing is quite similar to what V3/D4 is seeing meaning the much thinner rods going to the top of the mast are closer to experiencing 60% of breaking strength.

In the meantime we did have some nice into the wind stretches and certainly performance is not impacted (on the contrary) but the mast does need to stay up...

I am looking for some 'focused insights' into this issue, thanks in advance for sharing.