"DSK" wrote in message

| Yes. I fail to see your point though. If the vang holds the boom up,
| then it holds the boom up.
|
| If the vang will hold the boom down under heavy sailing loads, then it
| will probably hold at least as much in the opposite direction, nyet?

No Doug! No No No!.... look the vang may be able to hold the stresses on a
sail "down"... but it will never hold the stresses of a weight at the end of
the boom "UP". The leverage just isn't there. This is not a hydraulic arm on
an excavator! If it were the vang would be massive ... require an engine to
power the compressor and be attached to the end of the boom.

Look..... I can understand where your assumptions are based but I'm
thinking you have not taken into consideration the engineering incorporated
into the vang and it's intended use. If you have 10,000 lbs of pressure on
the main only a fraction of that force will be utilized to incur lift on the
boom. The vang is not holding down the entire pressure placed on the main.

For using the boom as a lifting device.... you will stress the vang unduly
with a set-up located that far back on the load arm. It's not designed for
that. A topping lift to the end of the boom requires much less force to hold
the boom level on a lift than the stresses placed on a vang that is located
at 15% of the load arm length. I don't care if it's a 1/2" I Channel carbon
steel beam for a boom! We are not discussing boom failure here.... we are
discussing load bearing to the vang.

I await your rebuttal... :-)

CM