To get the boat on the water I didn't have much in the way of sail tuning and setup. I'll now go through and fine tune all the control setups. My first little project was the main halyard. I have a 2:1 main halyard but only ran a 1:1.
The preferred fitting between the sail and halyard these days for this type of boat and 2:1 seems to be the Tylaska H8 halyard shackle with a breaking load around 3600kg and a cost of up to 178 dollars. I am going to make my own halyard shackle from a low friction ring by Ronstan RF8090-16 for $23 and soft shackle that I will make from 4mm dyneema with a total cost of around $25 and a breaking load of over 5,700 kg.
My first attempt used 1250mm of 4mm SK78 dyneema with a 250mm bury . The length of the bury was to ensure there were 4 thicknesses of dyneema through the eyelet in the sail. (this link will show how to do this type of soft shackle- http://www.bethandevans.com/pdf/improvedsoftshackle.pdf ) . The through hole in the dyneema to form the noose in the shackle was made 12mm past the centre between the eyes made in the end. This is the left most soft shackle in the pic. It proved to be long enough to work but not long enough to fix permanently to the LFR as per the soft shackle in the centre. The soft shackle in the centre was made the same but used 1400mm of dyneema. This seems long enough to meet my requirements with 105mm between bearing surfaces and a total weight of 33g as opposed to the H8 at 87.7gms. The soft shackle on the right was made from 800mm of 3mm sk75 dyneema with a 150mm bury and could have been strong enough with a BS of around 3400kg but I felt more comfortable with the thicker line . The size of the knots change quite a lot for only 1mm thicker line. As the noose has to open up enough to get the knot through it affects the distance between bearing surfaces because I want to be able to release the shackle without difficulty.