Kahuna,
I totally agree with your conclusion that the 2019
rigging of the strop line is much better than your
current rigging for the reasons you have described. Your four photographs provide perfect
documentation of how it was done.
My L48 is in
charter rental during the short summer season we have in the Pacific NW. Two years ago, a charterer tore a huge hole in the
mainsail for unknown reasons, so it was removed and quickly repaired by the
charter rental company. Unfortunately, they detached and cut off the strop that pulls the square top main to the top car and I could not figure out how to rerig it and had to come up with my own solution. My solution, shown in the photograph my previous post, works but I believe it chafes the main
halyard, so I've wanted to restore the strop and your pictures show me how to do it.
About the torn
mainsail and the stiffness you reported while raising your sail. There are two issues that sailors with square top mainsails should know about. First, a big part of the reason my main was torn was because before I bought my used L48, someone had replaced the strop with a line that was standard jacketed line and the jacket had torn and was bunching up. It's certain the strop must be
Dyneema or
Spectra, not so much because of its awesome strength, but because it is slippery and has no jacket to wear and tear off. Another hard to see cause of a stiff raising main is because the glide material inside the Antal sliders wears out over time, causing the slider to tilt at an angle and its
aluminum body to dig into the track. Specifically, the slider just under the top triple headsail car was the one that was most worn. Accelerated wear of the Antal glides may be caused because the square top main creates a large pulling force that is perpendicular to the
mast as it is being raised.
With a deal of effort, I was able to remove all the sliders by unscrewing the ones with studs from the batten boxes they mount into, then they all slide off the bottom of the track. To make a temporary
repair, I simply swapped the most worn (2nd from the top slider) with the one at the bottom of the track, which sees the lowest load from the sail and thus was least worn.
I have since purchased new Antal sliders (from Fisheries Supply in Seattle) but that proved to be a big challenge as well. My 2014 build L48 uses a larger size track and slider that Antal no longer has in their catalog. Most Antal sliders have the part number silkscreened on the side of the car, but not mine. My sliders and track are 26mm wide, which turned out to be the following p/n's: ANT-HS26.50S and ANT-HS26.60S. The smaller sliders are the 50S and the taller sliders are the 60S model. These are the simple sliders without the studs, but rather than
purchase more expensive sliders with studs, I simply installed the old studs on the new sliders.
Make a close
inspection of your highest Antal slider cars and wiggle them to see if they tilt a lot, because that may be the cause of you stiff raising mainsail. Antal will not sell just the replacement synthetic rub glides, but they will
rebuild the cars in
Italy with new glides. That's a reason to keep to old sliders to be rebuilt for later use.