Rope is used to rotate nearly all furling drums and some – such as Code 0 sail furlers and the old Hood in-mast system – employ a continuous line.
On my brigantine schooner Britannia, the French-made Facnor furling drivers on the mainsail and fore-course squaresail are operated by long ropes that pass once around the rotating drum and out the other side, then back to the cockpit.
They use a 3/8in (10mm), double-braided line to grip the driver, much like the jaws on a self-tailing winch, which in turn rotates the mandrel (foil) to wind the sails in and out.
My mainsail needs 16 rotations of the driver and the squaresail needs 19. Using a single line therefore results in a very long tail on one end or the other, whether the sails are furled or unfurled; the squaresail tail is 45ft long and the mainsail 35ft. These lines all lead back to the cockpit and, with the addition of two headsails and between-mast staysail furling lines, it can become very cluttered.
It would be a great improvement if these long lines could be made into a continuous loop, with only a few feet in the cockpit to go round the winches. Then I could just wind away, without having to coil yards of rope to keep the area tidy.
Considerations
There are different methods to make a continuous (or end-to-end) loop with double braided line, described in rope-maker manuals and web videos, but they result in a splice that is thicker than the rest of the rope, and may not pass around the jaws of drum drivers or through clutches, blocks and self-tailing winches, with serious possibilities of a rope jam. Therefore any continuous splice needs to be no thicker than the rest of the rope. Needless to say, the splice also has to be very strong.
This story is from the October 2021 edition of Practical Boat Owner.
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This story is from the October 2021 edition of Practical Boat Owner.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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