I mentioned plans for an inner forestay and reusing old headsails in my last post “Progress on Sails“. So I’ve checked the oldest headsail. At this point not sure if this will work as anything but a learning exercise.
So just been removing old, very worn hanks from what looks like an original (or close to it) headsail.
These are the sort that are sewn to small eyelets in the luff (front edge) of the sail to hold it to a forestay.
Here you can see just how worn some of them are (they are also all stuck, the piston won’t move to open the hank to put it on a wire forestay).
The challenge for reusing it is that the eyelets for these hanks are too small to fit a soft shackle in.
Both the eyelets and the hanks are pretty corroded which has been leaving stains on the sail. So hopefully simply removing the hanks and keeping the sail dry will mean no more damage until we have the inner forestay sorted and can see if it is likely to be useful.
Once we get dry enough weather for dry grass we will lay all these headsails out for a better look and a size comparison (no point in taking two the same size at the same time).
Sustainable Sailing 