Watch the cloth moth
So we’ve had a few great comments and questions from Jeffro and others about Puffin’s sails and how amazing they were looking after their 30,000-mile test run.
While I can’t take any credit for the design or building of them, that’s all down to Peter at Sander Sails and to Istvan for choosing a great sail maker, I thought I’d share some of Peter’s “secret sauce” for those who like a bit of traditional craftsmanship; so here you go:
The Mainsail, Genoa and Staysails are all made with a cloth from the German manufacturer Dimension Polyant called “410AP” with a UVM finish.
410 is the weight of the cloth in grams per square metre, which is about 9.6oz for our US friends.
UVM is a special coating that is applied to the cloth that increases the resistance to UV by about 25% – which would seem to be a super important add for long-duration offshore sailing.
On the construction side all sails had:
Separate Luff, Leech & foot tapes.
Triple stitched seams & UV resistant thread.
Mainsail had:
5 full-length battens, stainless rings with webbing straps.
(interestingly all the battens needed replacing, as they had broken in the batten cars)
Genoa had:
Acrylic sunstrip, Stainless steel clew ring with webbing straps and double head and
tack webbings with acrylic covers.
Staysails had:
Heavy-duty hanks with reinforced attachment points, stainless steel rings with webbing straps.
In the end, we chose only to have the Genoa and Main serviced, the Staysails and Asymmetric being as good as new, I’ll post a few “after service” photos when Puffin is back on the water.