diy furler mk2

The 50-miles race I joined with my brother didn't go too well for us. Right at the start the pin at bottom of my furler broke (I already had my doubts it would be strong enough, see earlier post). After sorting out the mess and hoisting the jib flying, we made good progress, overtaking a lot of monohulls. But halfway the race the attachment of the main halyard on the mainsail broke (what a shame, it was still on my to do list, but I thought it would hold as it had done so last few sails) and we left the race and sailed back using the jib only.

So it was no succes, but at least it was a good test for things to improve on the boat. Lesson learned: don't underestimate the forces on the rig, they are quite big even for such a small boat.

For other multihulls the race was a big succes. Against over 100 boats, line honours were taken by sorry alice (F31), second was Tom Siemerink with F32 Tresoor, third was Arno Molenaar with F31 Thrill Seeker. Fourth place was for the first monohull, a brand new 11,5 meter long carbon monohull skippered by withbread and Volvo Ocean Race skipper Roy Heiner. 5th place was for a dragonfly 970 and 7th place for a corsair 28.

After the failure of the first roller, I was ready to give up and to spend a few hundred euros on a commercial furler, but my brother convinced me it's good fun to try to build a proper working roller for a fraction of the cost. So I gave it another try. Below is the result. This time I made a cage for the furling drum enclosing the whole drum. Unlike with furler Mk1 it's not possible to feed a continuous line, but who cares? The furling line will just stay on the roller.

The roller MK1 had two big flaws.First the attachment points were not strong (enough). Beside that, the cage of the drum of the roller wasn't fixed in place. I mistakenly thought that made sense, but the result was the roller tended to roll instead of the sail. I fixed the cage by drilling through the main bolt and putting a pin into the hole.
The pin fits into a slot, cut in the cage, and locks it in place.
The attachment on top of the fuler is now made by a bent m6 (6mm) threaded rod, locked in place by two nyloc nuts in recesses (see photo below and above).
To fix the eye of the roller to the central bolt I made two threaded holes to put in short bolts. They are not bolted through (because that would weaken the bolt too much and it would snap again). The two stainless steel strips attach to the bow web pin, and will make sure the roller (+cage) can't twist.