up and over

A little video to start things off...

Had my wife help out for the first mast raising, then did a handful more myself -it's easy once you've done it once. I put a little tension into the shrouds, about 300 pounds and nothing went crack or flew off the boat, so that's good. I'm a few inches off on my gnav stay so couldn't get tension on it, and I goofed a little on my forestay adjuster- the diamond knot won't fit through the ferrule. Doh! I need to make up two new short pieces that basically reverse the spliced loop and diamond knot arrangement. For today I just hitched on a piece of line and 3:1'd it pretty tight while the uppers were slack, then tightened the uppers into it. I could grab and rotate the mast pretty well against the tension I had, so that looks like it should work ok. The upper spreaders want to flop inward a lot more than I thought they would, so I may some tinkering to do there.

I recognize that it's very hard to let go of an idea when it's something you've worked on for a while, and I think I'm still being rationally persistent to pursue this rig idea- nothing jumped out as working too much differently than in my little test model so long ago. I've certainly identified a couple things to refine, but I don't think they're terminal flaws. Yet.

and some miscellaneous pics to go with it...

Mast, rotated. No gnav tension, and probably a little too little topmast tension. Fore-and-aft curvature remains pretty constant through the rotation, which I really wanted.

I'm taking an LP measurement with the little black piece of tape standing in for a jib clew, but you can see the general arrangement of the jib sheeting strings. There'll be one more line that pulls the car outward. It looks like the location of the sheet turning block will be enough to haul the car inward.

The forestay. As said above, this is just a hobble since I goofed on the intended adjustment strings. This should be a loose headstay setting, with additional tension bringing the ferrule down to about 1.5" from the deck.

Hounds, with a tape measure's hook taped to the mast right at the top-of-sheave location.

I had my wife banjo the headstay a bit so I could look at the mast with a bit more tension.

I measured 2.2" at the hounds, and 2.6" at the lower spreaders (with the bottom of the straight line reference at the beginning of the sail track).

And here's the boat back in the shop. I have a sealer coat of epoxy on (most of) the hull from the cross country trip, so I'll start with a wash, then a healthy DA sanding, then an overall coat of sorta-thin bog to start the longboarding.

Yay.