[Rhodes22-list] IMF Furling Repair; Mainsail replacement; mast lowered and raised twice out on the lake yesterday

[David Keyes]

Stan's mast-hoist system is great.  I am 64, worked single-handed yesterday--no one around to help.  I spent all day today taking down the mast (twice) at the dock, in howling winds, replacing the mainsail, and fixing the IMF.  No serious problems and nothing dropped overboard.  

Last fall, my mainsail jammed in the out position for a week.  The sheet metal screw holding the upper bearing had backed out, jamming against the inside of the mast at the top.  I used cords to tie the sail against the mast while I was away for a week, but they came loose in windy weather, causing the sail to beat against the spreaders and sustain sail damage.  The slapping around also caused the screw to fall out, thus again permitting the sail to be furled back in and out.  After a few months of raising and lowering the boom slider/IMF tube, the upper bearing (now missing its set screw) came off the top of the tube and fell part way down the mast just inside the slot, preventing the sail from being unfurled past that point.  Time to fix everything and replace the sail--all with great help by email from Stan, as well as earlier helpful input from the R22 list.  I had never taken the mast down before, since my boat stays in the water full time and I don't own a trailor.  Based on advice from the R22 list, I decided to do the work without taking the boat out of the water.

Following Stan's advice, I removed the boom prior to lowering the mast--this removed some of the bulk from the IMF repair job that I had to do (which involved sliding the IMF tube out the bottom of the mast), although boom removal wasn't necessary.  The IMF upper bearing did have a hole, but no screw was in sight.  I drilled a new hole in the tube off to the side of the old one, and countersunk a 1-inch stainless #6 sheet metal screw.  I replaced the mainsail with the one that Stan sent me--the new style with the vertical battens.

All is working fine now, but I will need to replace the 4" carriage bolt at the mast step (the last half inch and the wing nut were stripped and sheared off).  Temporarily, the mast is sitting OK for the time being with no wing nut.  Also, I bent the spring pin in the pop-top block slider.  I tried to straighten it out, but it does't work as well as it should.  Stan will send me the bolt and a replacement pop-top slider pin which can be replaced on the next mast-lowering.  I made a not very important gouge in the pop top cover with the now-bent pin.  This happened because the second time I lowered the past I had forgotten to slide up the pop-top block (but the slider was detached from the pop top cover).

Brief diary of the day:  I worked at the dock, in about 20 feet of water.  I used the sailboat on the opposite side of the dock, to my bow, as a "table" to hold the IMF tube as it came out.  I was pleasantly surprised that the IMF tube is so rigid that I was able to carry it off the dock and up on the grass to work on it, without any excess bending.  The weather was bright sunshine, with low winds increasing to howling winds during the mast lowering and raising.  Drinking lots of water still left me six pounds lighter at the end of the day--194 down to 188.

I spent the morning carefully going through instructions and lowering the mast and removing the IMF tube.  In early afternoon I wasted 45 minutes looking for a 1-1/4" #6 sheet metal screw, but it turned out that the 1" I already had worked.  It is necessary to countersink the screw head into the bearing so that it does not bind inside the mast.  By 4 p.m., I had the mast back up, the IMF repaired, no damage or incidents, and everything perfect.  My 7/64 drill bit (used to drill the hole in the IMF tube for the self-tapping sheet metal screw) was too dull, and it took several attempted holes and lots of elbow grease.   Next time I will start out with a high-quality new drill bit for hard metal.   The only other glitch on my lowering of the mast had been to forget to unplug the radio and light plugs at the foot of the mast--the wires certainly got a tugging before I noticed it when the mast was almost all the way down.  Amazing that the wires didn't pull out of their plugs.

So, at 4 p.m. I had removed the mast hoist and was finished except to restore the boom and for trying the IMF.  The IMF was jammed.  I seemed to have lost an extra wrap that I needed and also the sail seemed wedged, with the new vertical battens taking extra space in the wrapped sail.  (Stan subsequently advised me not to retract the self-cover area, containing the battens.)  I was no longer confident that I had wrapped the sail and the IMF furling line correctly.  

So . . . from 4 to 6:30 I repeated the job except for the now-fixed bearing--I lowered the mast and removed the IMF tube again and took the tube and sail back up on the grass and started again.  I lowered the mast from memory and while tired--no instructions--a mistake since I forgot this time to slide the boom block and pop-top block to the high positions, so that I heard a crunch of the pop-top block into the pop-top cover.  I also seemed to have stripped some of the threads on the mast-step bolt, because the wing nut could not be removed, and I finally sheared off the end.

However, by 6:15, when I got back to where I had been at 4 p.m., everything worked.  I don't know if I had done anything wrong on the first IMF furling installation or not.  So I replaced the boom.  I had to pull and work carefully to get the sail out of the slot the first time, past the vertical battens, but then it expanded and retracted easily.

I noted that the luff line of the new sail, in the IMF tube slot, is about 1-1/2" longer than the old one.  I was going to drill new holes for the upper and lower brackets where the sail loops attach, so as to extend them to their full length.  But it was so difficult to drill the one hole for the IMF bearing that I did not do this.

Stan's mast-hoist instructions talk about walking the genoa back to the mast.  By email he told me not to do this if it is a CDI or other third-party installation--I have the 175% genoa with the CDI furler.  I will remember next time the importance of sliding up the boom and pop-top blocks to their high set points; I had focused on the most important step of removing the pin connecting the pop-top cover to the mast.  I will also remember the obvious point, if one notices or thinks about it, that the electrical lines should be unplugged.

One safety point that almost caught me.  At one point I got my thumb up into the rope coil around the crane winch.  Not a good idea.  The beginnings of what in a split second more would have been torture chamber time prompted me to remove my thumb faster than the speed of light.  It didn't even hurt or cause a mark on my thumb--the story would have been different if I hadn't stopped winding and got my hand out of the way in the nick of time.  As Stan warns in his instructions, keep clear and realize that there are a lot of mechanical forces, and protect the boat by stoppiong instantly if anything is going wrong.  I found Stan's instructions very helpful to watch all the stays and keep everything clear and free from binding and be ready to stop immediately.  At one point a found a lower shroud caught between the edge of a porthole and the cabin--I saw this before ever starting to raise the mast.

Two times does not make me an expert, and obviously no where near the experience of those who trailer their boats.  But if anyone on the list thinks that my day of doing all this might have given me some useful experience relating to tasks that someone else on the list maybe hasn't done before, I will be glad to try to answer questions about how I did some of this work, what I thought was hard and what was easy, and what I might do differently next time.  Overall, the day was a success.

David Keyes
S/V Arrowhead
Lake Travis
Austin, Texas