[quote=reverend]Tom,
To clarify myself better....I don't think that there is a practical way of regulating the speed of the winch (except for possibly your 'rub plate'). What I was trying to say in the other e-mail was that if the sail began to drop too quickly...ansd you became fearful about the cable on the winch balling up....was to have one hand on the 'lock lever' and force it back into the lock position, abruptly stopping the mail sail from dropping down any further...and hopefully stopping it before the cable had time to unspool off the winch!! Then when your sure nothing has unspool...you once again unlock the lever and continue the prodcess of lowering the mast. Chances are, as was in our case on the former P-Cat, as soon as you did that, the mail would just continue it freefall....to which you would once again engage the lock lever. And so it would go until enough of the main had been lowered that the weight of the mail sail did not create enough tension to pull the remaining sail down...which was somewhere around the top third of the sail!
Tom...with Bill's diligent help I have finally learned how to post some pictures...so...if you go to where you found Bill's pictures...I'm now right next to him!! I've got one picture of inside the area of the central 'cross beam'. I have more to post on the interior section but.....well....here's the thing: on my laptop, it doesn't matter how I'm holding the camera: I have the option of saying which way I want up to be. So...when taking pictures of the interior of the P-Cat, it was much easier to hold the camera upside down to take the picture looking into the center part of the boat...other wise I would have had to fit my whole hand inside the portal in order to snap the picture...but...if I turned the camera up-side-down I could take the picture with my hand still on the outside of the hole. Why am I telling you this? Because when I post those pictures on BeachCat...the pictures are all upside down. So, rather then having to write out an lengthy explanation about the picture being upside down...I thought I'd rather just try and take the pictures upside right. So....until then...you'll have to settle for this one picture. (Of course if the port side portal was hot temporally stuck shut I could have taken the center section easily enough from there!
Also...you can see pictures of Bill cutting the bent bolt off the toilet seat today!
BTW: What size cable are you using for your halyard? And...what is the cable's overall length?? (I'm going to be replacing mine)
We'll also be dealing with the stress fractures on the base of the mast step hinge.
Have a great sail this weekend...please tell us how it goes, alright?
Until later,
jt[/quote]
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