Kev n Jens Adventures: 2023-06-11

Kevin has been on a schedule where he gets up at 4:00AM most mornings. One morning when he got up this early he decided to look for new sails for our sailboat. He noticed that sails are very expensive and thought he could save us some money by buying sails from Sailrite which provides kits so that you can make your own sails. Needless to say, I wasn't thrilled when I found this out and thought maybe it would have been a good idea to mention it to me before buying the sails and maybe we just could start with one sail to see how it goes. Anyway, the very next day after ordering both a jib and a mainsail, we got the shipment from Sailrite. The directions for each sail were 30 pages long. We spent most of the first day, reading the directions and watching Youtube videos (luckily Sailrite had some very good instructional videos). We immediately had questions, and reached out to Sailrite for help, and were given the e-mail of Jeff (who authored the directions) to send any questions to. Every time we came to a section that we couldn't figure out, we'd send off an e-mail to Jeff and would get a response usually in 10-20 minutes. It took us about a week to complete the jib (Jeff told us to start with it, and when we eventually got to the main it would be easy), and for that week we basically ate, slept and sewed. We learned quite a lot about sails (probably more than we wanted to know), but after it was done we really felt like we had accomplished something!

Thursday June 8, 2023 - We spent half the day understanding the directions and then got the sewing machine ready. In the afternoon we put together our first patch and sewed sail pieces together

practicing our zigzag stitch through multiple pieces of sail

Each corner of the sail has a "patch", which is made up of 5 pieces of sail, each a bit larger than the last piece. These patches are sewed together, then sewed onto the proper corner of the sail. This was our first completed patch

The clew patch has webbing sewn onto it with a D ring sewn into the edge of the patch

Sailrite recommended trying to sew on the floor, since the rolled up sails are so gigantic. We tried it and decided we were too old for that and opted for a card table with Kevin feeding the sail through the sewing machine while I sewed.

Friday, June 9th - We worked on learning how to splice rope and sewed the last two patches onto the sail. We also sewed the leech line into the sail.

practice splicing rope onto a thimble

placing the patch to the head of the sail

Saturday June 10, 2023 - We finished the edges of the sail, sewed the boltrope pocket, pulled the boltrope into the pocket, spliced the boltrope onto the thimble and practiced sewing the boltrope eye into place (which we had questions about, so we had to take Sunday off while we waited for a response from Jeff)

tape is sewn around the outside edges of the sail to finish them

These edges are first basted (using double sided tape) to the sail, so it's relatively easy to sew them. My knee pads from our sailing days in NJ on Jitterbug came in very handy for all the crawling around on the floor I had to do.

We rolled the sail, and Kev fed it through the machine while I sewed.

Our first spliced thimble. Part of the sail is cut away so the eye can be hand sewn at the bottom. We weren't sure how to cut this piece.

So we made a mock corner and practiced

We practiced the stitch with some fishing line, and sent a pic to Jeff to see if we had placed it correctly

Monday June 12, 2023 - We spliced the other end of the boltrope and hand sewed all three of the corners

We got the OK from Jeff that we had placed the thimble properly

Our second splicing to the thimble, this time at the head

"hand" stitching to secure the thimble to the sail (it took a hammer and pliers to hand stitch)

Completion of the hand stitching at the tack corner

Brass rings were cut into the fabric inside of the thimbles at the head and tack corners and also hand sewn.

Tuesday June 13, 2023 - We set the grommets behind the boltrope and then added the hanks. WE ARE FINISHED (except for pieces of cowhide that can be sewn over each corner, if we decide to do it)