Do me a favor – If you ever see the boat for real, dont look at the sail cover too closely! I was definitely not cut out to be a sail maker or to have anything to do with sewing machines.
You may have already seen the first steps with this job back in July. So yes it did take me three months to do the other things and finally get organised to make the sail ties and put in some brass grommets. The positive thing is that in the meantime I was involved in using the sewing machine to turn up some curtain hems at Grace’s house and during that I think I finally got the thread tension reasonably right so the machine will now do a straight stitch properly and slight zig-zags reasonably well. This bit of the job is getting done in the kitchen rather than the conservatory so very definitely needs to be done in evenings while Helen is at the Gym or baby-sitting.
Sail ties first – These were reasonably easy once I had re-assembled the boom and sail combination and made a roughly flaked down heap of mainsail against which to do the measuring. 3M of webbing and a couple of hours uninterrupted sewing and cutting time made me five different lengths of sail ties each with about 15 cm of velcro sewn onto opposite ends and sides. That gives me a reasonable amount of overlap on each one so the hold will be fairly firm and positions of each tie along the tapering sail pack will not matter too much.
After that achievement I now have an easily transportable test bed to work out how to get the cover to close easily and
neatly. I randomly decided on 50 cm spacing between each closure point along the bottom and it has only taken me a couple of evenings to add six reinforcing patches down one side ready to add the grommets.
Getting grommets through four layers of the canvas was not an easy job though so if there is a next time I will be getting a proper press tool instead of the small anvil and punch that came with the inserts. The key part of the process was to use the biggest hammer I could sensibly use one handed and use the grommet setting end of the tool to cut rather than the end that the instructions say to use. Even when you have a hole through the layers then you really need to be an octopus to align the fabric, small anvil ring, two halves of the eyelet and the punch tool ready to use the other hand to hit the tool with a hammer. The eyelet pairs are not perfectly aligned with the edge of the cover but maybe they dont look as bad overall as they do when you are fighting with the install.
Next stage for now is to make sure the seam along the top will be water proof. I am doing that at Matthew’s empty house so there is heating to evaporate the glue solvent but no people around most of the time to smell the fumes. That also fits quite well with doing plastering on the cupboard which was being readied to be the start of the stairs to a loft extension (Now abandoned because post-covid builders quotes seem to be 2 1/2 to 3 times pre-covid ones).
Firs
t I glued the two edges of the seam together and then folded it over and glued it to one side of the cover using some clear parcel tape to hold it in position while the solvent evaporated. I haven’t really decided yet but I may finish it off by gluing and sewing a length of canvas as a tape along the inside of the seam. Next step will be to thread some cord through and then sew curtain hooks onto the other edge of the cover. After a bit of experimenting I decided that sew- in curtain hooks were going to be far too fiddly so I removed the hooks from the old cover – Not too hard a job as the proofed canvas is so deteriorated it would rip in anything above force 0. Nice easy job to sew these on the new cover and I can use decent size cord which will make it all easier to handle with cold fingers.
All going fine now that the frosty period has passed. For a bit there it was too cold to even feel like testing the final collar and flap to go round the mast and cover up where lacing the cover together might let in rain. For the moment I am happy it is usable but I really need the mast to be up and the sail properly stowed before I can complete the final stage by adding the velcro on the flap.