Sailmaking

From Sailcut

This is the place where you may find and add tips for making sails.

Sails can be made of many material.

• The classical material is a tigtly woven cloth impregnated with a resin to give it better resistance to stretch in the bias.
• The modern racing sails are made of laminate material. Such laminate is essentially a sandwich of film (Polyester or other material) and fibers oriented in various directions in order to provide the necessary strength and stretch resistance. The laminates are often covered with a thin woven cloth to provide durability against abrasion.
• Other material such as Vinyl film with fiber reinforcement such as material for making tarpolin (Polytarp) can be used for experimenting on sails before commiting to a more expensive material.
• For model racing boats the Clear Polyester film (Mylar) used for packing flower bunches is a usefull cheap material. Alternatively some water resistant paper type material can be used for experimenting.

Sail panels assembly is the most delicate part of sail making as any slippage between panels or unevenness of tension during the stiching will be visible on the finished sail. In order to ease this phase it is recommended to glue the panels together with double sided sticky tape before stitching them.

Plotting panels by hand is the most common way of using the output of Sailcut CAD for making sails. To do that requires very little investment. You essentially need a flat plotting surface with a straight edge, a square angle piece and a tape measure. Use metric tape as all dimensions provided by Sailcut CAD are in millimeters.