The old ones were corroded and friction-filled. When we went to remove them, most of the machine screws holding them in place sheered off (and the resultant bits were a bitch to remove). The new blocks are high-load and expensive.
The old mainsheet setup wasn’t good enough for me. There wasn’t enough puchase power to sheet and ease the main by hand, without the use of a winch. I want to be able to do it much more quickly than the winch setup will allow. Also, the old blocks were worn out (high friction).
We spent a small fortune on seven new high-tech blocks to fix the system, and it works like a dream. It can be sheeted in and out by hand even in heavy wind, and it makes the job of trimming the main quick and pleasant–which incidentally means that it gets adjusted and fine-tuned much more frequently.
I designed some super simple mast steps for us. I didn’t like the popular commercially available options: the folding steps are too much of a hassle, too complicated, and too much money, and the stirrup kind are too large and bulky (fouling lines) and also too expensive. All three of us are climbers, so we wanted just a small “L” just large enough for secure purchase, with rounded corners to let lines easily pass by. I asked a sailing machinist John Ryan for advice and help, and got a ton. John Ryan graciously improved the design and fabricated them, far more perfectly than we ever expected (from choice of aluminum alloy, to the tumbling to remove all edges, to the clear anodize finish, and even the rivets, drill bit size, and pattern to follow for drilling the holes!), and jonny installed them. Well they’re all in now and the end result is stellar–everything that we wanted. It is fast and easy to climb to the top of the mast, fun even. Everyone who sees them wants their own, too!
Over the past month Jonny has completely dismantled, cleaned, and regreased all of the winches except two–the last two need to be removed from the cockpit coaming for servicing. We still need to figure out what to do about the finish on the drum of a few of them; the chrome is half off and the resulting rough surface is eating up our halyards on the cabintop.
The old system: original jammer-style rope clutches, a mess of deck fairleads that no longer turned, lines crossed on the deck. The jammer-style clutches are frustrating because they can’t be released under load, which means that to drop a halyard for example you have to wrap it around the winch put the handle in and crank an inch just to be able to release the clutch. We tore out all the old deck fairleads and rope clutches and installed all new. We drilled and cored all the holes at the same time (old and new) and filled them with epoxy plugs. We cut large plates from our sheet of 316 stainless for backing blocks, and laboriously drilled all the necessary holes. The one bank of clutches needed to be elevated slightly off the deck for a fair lead; we used a piece of our UHMW (ultra high molecular weight) plastic to do the job. Everything was bedded with lifecaulk. In short, it was all done BTB (by the book). The new system is a dream–the boat is far easy and more pleasant to sail, largely because the friction is a fraction of what it was. It was worth every penny of the ~$1500 we spent on clutches and fairleads. I have to rank this as the most satisfying modification to our boat so far.
