Rigging - More Thinking and Thinking

Boat building involves a lot of thinking. When you build a boat almost from scratch a lot of details run through your head. And not only once ....

So our boat is a ketch. A fairly large one - 51ft and displacement is about 25000kg.

I am not a rigging specialist, just an engineer (electrical drives and control) with a desire to a do a lot of stuff myself.

So I have been doing the math following various sources for rigging and generally mechanical engineering. Frankly I did the maths countless times.

Generally in ketch the main mast is and can be a bit shorter than in a same size sloop. This puts less stress to the rig generally.

Because our main mast profile is pretty massive, see photo. I calculated and discussed with rigging experts that our main mast will do fine with one spreader pair.

I did long think about the standing rigging. Stainless steel, AISI 316, or galvanized or dyneema.

I did choose finally the dyneema, because I want to have a rigging that I can repair myself with fairly simple tools. WIth galvanized I could have achieved the same repair flexibility, but then it would have been heavier and at some point corrosion particularly where galvanized touches AISI316 chainplates.

So I ordered Dyneema from this company https://www.cgahrens.de/ and started learning to splice. One friendly and really skilled machining expert corrected my first hand made thimbles.

For the running rigging and for boom rigging I will use Nodus Factory components. Great stuff. Soft but really strong. Less noise, because of soft material.

All Nodus Factory products are manufactured in France.

https://www.nordenboot.com/rigg-segel/

Soon more photos and stories about rigging.