| Author | Message | ||
     Gary Hendrickson Rating: N/A |
Initially my boat's backstay was a lot harder to pull on than I expected, and there was a grinding noise while I was increasing backstay. In the end there were two different problems to solve. After a series of backstay adjustments with grinding noise, there were a few very small metal shavings in my cockpit. I looked up and saw that the backstay's metal pinching sheave assembly was twisted 20 degrees or so with respect to the stern. Eventually I stumbled upon the fix -- you turn the two backstay bridle sections, while holding their respective turnbuckles in place, in the direction needed to get the pincher assembly square to the stern. Voila, no more grinding noise, but the sheaves were so deeply gouged by the wire rope they had to be replaced. The tough backstay adjustment was made worse by too much friction in the 6-part adjuster system. There are 9 sheaves altogether in this system, all solid bearing Shaeffer blocks! They were 15 years old, and applying MacLube didn't make that big a difference. I decided to replace the 7 backstay blocks at the stern with the new Harken 40 mm ball bearing Carbo-Blocks. Wow, what an improvement in ease of adjustment! Incidentally, this can make it too easy to bend the mast beyond the OEM's specifications. Offshore Spars had specified that their masts must not be bent more than one and a half times the fore-and-aft section thickness. On the 9.1 I believe that means no more than about 9 inches maximum cord between the bent mast and a taut mainsail halyard held to the mainsail track at the gooseneck. |
