It took me and a couple of friends about three hours to get it right on
my Cal 20. That included putting up the mast itself.

"DSK" wrote in message
...
N1EE wrote:

Doug you are talking about a mast
being straight side to side, and
of course you are correct that many
people don't get this right. For one
thing is a pain and take a lot of time
tweaking the shrouds.

If you know the method, it doesn't really take that much time. I think
most
people don't approach it methodically and either make it worse or else
fiddle
around forever. The important thing is to loosen all the lowers first and
get the
masthead centered, few people seem willing to start by un-doing all
previous mast
tuning.

It used to be that tuning manuals would talk about getting a uniform
athwartships
bend to either open or close the slot, depending on whether the boat
needed more
pointing or more power. But it has turned out that keeping the mast "in
column"
meaning straight when viewed athwartship is faster. It may be that modern
sails
(different cut & materials) respond enough differently that back then, the
side-to-side bend did help.... if you got it right...

We've had this demonstrated dramatically twice... once in the Lightning
and once
in the Johnson 18. Somehow one lower shroud got tightened and I did not
scrupulously check the mast before setting out for the starting line. We
could
point sort of OK on one tack, but terrible on the other, and despite all
we could
do were sailing alongside the tail-enders. After spotting & fixing the
problem
(which made me vow for the 100th time, always review the basics) we had
front row
seats.




MC is talking about mast bend as used
for sail shaping--another subject entirely.

Yes, as usual he missed the point.

I think that it would be good to discuss mast bend & rake, too. Then MC
will get
to toss in his 2 cents (but he'll probably still be wrong).

Fresh Breezes- Doug King