I had an oops today. The bungie cord that goes through the main beam and holds the crew's trapeze lines snapped today. Now I have to figure out how to thread a new line through.
The only thing I can think of so far is to put the boat on her side and try to drape the line down through the beam. Does anybody have a better idea?
Thanks,
take the end cap off and use your tiller extension to feed the shockcord
Either tillerextension or ducttaping a few battens together.
Sometimes you need to loosen the beam bolts to get the end cap off
batten and some tape.
Any piece of stiff or hard wire can be threaded through the beam. An example would be 80 or 90 pound leader wire. You can also use an electrician's snake, or plumber's snake.
I got my retrieval line threaded through my beam. Thanks for the suggestions. I ended up doing the following:
1) The end-caps on my forward beam have two holes in them, a small one that the bungie line goes through, and a larger one that looks like an inspection port.
2) I threaded the bungie in the small hole on the starboard side and then out the large hole on the starboard side.
3) I duck tapped the end of the bungie cord to the end of my tiller extension, which happens to be just thin enough to go through the larger hole.
4) I pushed the bungie through the large hole on the port side and untaped it, then removed my extension from the beam.
5) threaded the bungie through the small hole on the port side. This was the hardest part of the whole procedure. It required making a paper clip hook, inserting that into the small hole, hooking the bungie and pulling it through. This was difficult because the bolt that holds the beam onto the hull was in the way and my fingers were too thick. My daughter's fingers were small enough though! I knew having that kid was a good idea. 🙂
The problem with what your doing is it's going to easily break again.
You need to take the end caps off and add a small block at each end. You can tie them to the bolt or attach them to the end cap. Start at one side and run the cord through the block on the other side then back through on the side you started and finally back out the hole on the other side.
You wind up with three lengths of cord in the beam which reduces the pull on the cord and allows the user to peter pan without breaking it. ( there are limits )
Ha! He doesn't know about that yet. He will, soon enough.
Mike's idea makes sense and explains what the blocks inside the the beam are for. I checked the bungie that broke and it was not long enough to be set up that way. I saw in the Viper rigging instructions that a
control line
was rigged up as you describe, but since what I was replacing wasn't rigged that way, I wasn't sure that it was necessary... The Viper instructions call just about every line a
control line
and I wasn't sure what the diagram in section 5.2 represented. I will look at the Vipers this weekend and see what's going on inside their front beams.
That's got me curious though, what about the shock cord for the skipper? On my boat the cord goes from the starboard trapeze, under the tramp directly to the port trapeze. There isn't any room for peter panning on it either...
Good times. I remember sending my bro around the forestay and I swear I could see his imprint on the backside of the spinnnaker before we went over...