You are of course right Wouter, that was why the "stealing" was in quotes.
We have hand cut some sails from the bottom up. Hand cutting panels is tedious and time consuming, but if you are short on money it is a good way to reduce costs. If you want to learn more about sails, shapes, design etc. it is a great thing to do. You will not get it right the first time, so you will have plenty opportunity to do re-cuts and modifications. You will also learn about what kind of loads there really are on beachcat sails. Dont expect to do the first sails in a night though.. Assembling a pre-cut kit is much simpler and still a challenge the first time you have a go at it.
As for sewing machines, I did my first homebuildt sails on an old Pfaff with no walking foot. I bought a grommet tool from Sailrite with some of their nickel grommets. These grommets dont take the same loads a real steel grommet does, but you really dont need them to if you are a bit creative. For the mainsheet on a mainsail you stitch a webbing loop to the sail instead. For the downhaul, you install one of the sailrite grommets and reinforce it with a web loop at the top. For the halyard grommet there are similar things that can be done. The same goes for luff ropes etc. There are always ways to improvise and get a good result if you really want to.
A domestic sewing machine is all you need if you go with Maxx or Flexx cloth. For dacron it can be a bit of a stretch, but there are certain tricks you can try. Dont expect the sewing machines owner to like them <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
Tami is right of course, but you need to learn some things on yourself. We plan to build no less than three suites of sails for our boats this spring.
If you start the project and want whatever advice I can give, just keep the thread alive. There are others here who also know a lot about the topic. There are several sailmakers in the Netherlands so you should be able to buy what you need locally. Perhaps you even can make a deal with a sailmaker and have him cut the panels for you.
