J24 Blog

Shown at a recent measurement session at Kvichak Marine Industries are, from left, Scott Milne, Measurer Noel Morgan, Richard Demmler, Measurer Mike Johnson and Keith Whittemore. Milne's and Demmler's boats were being measured, and Whittemore, also a J/24 owner, is a partner at Kvichak and provided the space for the boats.

[source: CYC Seattle]

In a cavernous construction space at Kvichak Marine Industries in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, measurers from J/24 Fleet 26 are hard at work.

It is Thanksgiving weekend, and three boats are lined up on trailers inside the big shed, where they have been packed with heaters and fans for a couple of days to suck out the moisture before they are weighed. A fourth boat, already measured, is parked on the street.

Mike Johnson and Noel Morgan, armed with tape measures, templates and weighing scales, are climbing all over the boats, inspecting for measurement integrity and taking both notes and photos which they will later add to a database to track each of the about 30 active boats in the Seattle fleet. Measuring all of them will take several more weekends and countless hours of work, all in preparation for the J/24 North American Championships, to be held on Puget Sound in May.

Full article here.

We’re ready to disassemble the boom, shake out the several decades of dirt and spider-webs that must be sealed inside, and re-build our mainsail outhaul. The class regs allow up to a 6:1 outhaul purchase. I’m fairly certain that ours is still the stock 2:1. At any rate, the rope portion of the line that exits midboom for cleating is so worn it looks like an old clothes line. It’s seriously overdue for replacement.

We had planned to buy the outhaul replacement kit from Annapolis Performance Sailing, or just buy the same parts from Fisheries Supply or West Marine locally. The kit comes with all the parts and line you need and 3 of the 4 swages completed. The last swage connects the wire to the shackle end after it passes through the sheave-box on the end of the boom, so it must be done as the last step of installation. This means that buying or borrowing a swaging tool…

I sent and email to our fleet listserv and got back some offers to lend swaging tools, but more importantly, got some guidance on upgrading the outhaul to an all-rope system and eliminating the wire portions all together. 3 different replies came in from top boats in our fleet with the same recommendation: go with the high tech ropes, get all the wire that isn’t required by the class off your boat. One recommendation even eliminated the shackle – they just tie the end of the outhaul line into the sail with a bowline. That is serious go-fast mode.

My new plan is to buy the couple of double and triple blocks needed, then construct the rest from rope. I’ll probably go with knots to ensure that I can get all the lengths right, and decide later if we should pay a rigger to go with splices instead.

The intended shopping list is:

• Harken H227
• Harken H228
• About 35′ of 1/4″ line with a poly jacket that will be the cleating end that also runs through the block system inside the boom
• About 10′ of 1/8″ 12 braid line from which I’ll make the two different portions
• An 18″ pennant that runs from the sail shackle, through the sheave and connects to the block system inside the boom, and
• A 5 1/2′ section that connects the block system inside the boom to it’s anchor point inside the gooseneck

I’m hoping to get it all assembled and installed this weekend. We’ll see how it works in next Tuesday night’s race.

Filed by: Brian

So Peter and I finally found some time to get down to the boat on a non-racing day to work on re-tuning the rig. We’ve worked on the rig settings a number of times in the last 2 years of owning the boat and have come to realize that it’s a process of continuous tweaking. What’s also helped is the level of understanding we’ve gained each time by starting back at zero and working the rig back up to what we believe is “optimal.”

Now, if you’ve ever tried to find information on tuning your one design sailboat’s mast and standing rigging you’ll inevitably find an avalanche of information available online. A great deal of that information will depend on the brand of sails that you fly, and most of this collective mass of information will prove to be inconsistent or contradictory across all the sources. Hence, it’s taken us 2+ seasons of working on it, and we’re still not quite there… However, once you hit critical mass from all that information intake, some things finally start to knit together.

More insightful information and a neat matrix after the click…

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Notes on our outing with Keith Whittemore.

Aaron Koopman’s comments are in italics.

Tuning

Mast position: The boat was designed with the keel too far aft. This means the center of effort of the sail plan is not in line with the center of resistance of the hull. That’s why the mast needs to be shortened, and moved aft. Keith only uses the Loos gauge in two situations. The first is when the mast goes into the boat. Basically he gets the shrouds set up so there is a separation of 4 on the gauge; he starts at 21/17 (uppers/lowers) or 24/20. The second situation is when it is blowing really hard and you want to get the shroud tension in the neighborhood of 34 on the outers (-4 or 31 on the inners) before you hit the water.

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