How often do you drop the rig and give it a complete inspection? We see $10 parts fail all the time that leads to major issues and wonder how often you look at that stuff? Do you use cotter pins or rings and if both where do you use each? Do you use rigging tape to lock in your pins and rings? We also see where the lack of 50 cents of tape a pin will work its way out. Whens the last time you pulled your sheaves and inspected the axle pins and the sheave themselfs? What are your schedules and rituals?
Thanks...
Dale
Rig inspection and pin replacement is on my project list - in truth I've been so focused on the mechanical and interior that I haven't given it the priority that it merits.
Having said that, I've been very conscious of the fact that I have an unknown rig, and so I sail on the conservative side when underway.
Great topic!
We inspect the rig every year, but we haven't taken it down. The yacht club has riggers come up from Seattle at the beginning of the season, and they will do the whole Bosun's chair thing for a small fee. Definitely worth the price, since they have caught some hardware that really needed to be replaced before it blew out on the water. We also replaced all of the wires when we bought Polaris a few years back.
Dale, do you recommend actually taking the masts down periodically and if so how often? Not a big deal for the mizzenmast, but it seems like a very big job for the main.
If you have a rigger inspect your set up every year you should be fine. The rig on a 365/367 is a robust tree stump and it will take a lot to take it down. Taking the rig down does remove the tension on items such as the spreaders and then you can remove them to determine the condition of the base castings. Very few riggers will do this while aloft. Dissasembling the furler once every 5 years or so isn't a bad idea either as the hidden forestay can then be inspected.
We have a customer with and 30 foot race boat with a 50 foot noodle spar and double spreader solid rod rigging. He decided to take his spar down for us to paint it and we found small cracks where the spar met the deck during the prep phase of painting. Those were welded and that issue has been eliminated. In addition to applying an Awlgrip paint job to the spar, we applied Dyekem to all of his rod and found cracks on several of his standing rigging. A spar up inspection would not have found these issues. Dyekem (manufacture) is a two part non-destructive inspection process where you apply a developer and then a dye. Anywhere there is a crack the dye will stand out very visibly. The cracks in the rod rigging we found were not visible to the human eye without the dye process. Note - the inspection process took us almost 6 hours, however one failure would have cost the owner the spar.
You are light years ahead of the typical boater in your inspection process. If you have an issue you have done all you can reasonably do to nip in in the bud. I suspect it is your technical backgrounds. It is the rest of the people that worry me...
Dale