I'm thinking of making my own sails, guess I'm not the only one toying with this thought. I hope to profit from the experience of others, to be able to make informed decisions whether to go ahead with it or not, and how to go about it. I've found two interesting threads http://www.catsailor.com/forums/showflat...=true#Post63203 and http://www.catsailor.com/forums/sho...;amp;page=0&fpart=1&vc=1 on this forum . I'd like advice about sail design resources: good books, websites, design software. Which skills are needed, what tools are absolutely necessary, which ones are nice to have but not essential. What are the pros and cons of different designs, materials and construction methods. Which suppliers can you recommend. I'd be glad to hear from anybody who has any thoughts and experience on this matter.

The book you want is "Art and science of sails" by Tom Whidden. Out of print and might be hard to get. If you can not get it, you could check "Maximum sail power". As always, there is a lot of information to pick up in "High performance sailing" as well when you get as far as designing the sails.

I would reccommend that you do a crosscut sail first. Either in standard dacron or Maxx/Flex cloth depending on your budget and equipment. For assembling a Maxx/Flex sail, all you need is a good floor, some measure tapes, the supplies, a good scissor and a domestic sewing machine. I would have done the design first and got through that part before deciding on cloth and where to get it.

''Art & science of sails''~~~~Amazon.com..under books 22.95
by Tom Whidden & Mike Levitt

Here's also a great place to start -

Sailrite

Kits, materials, sewing machines, etc. You just may find a kit for what you're trying to do.

Building a kit the first time is probably a good idea. Their instructions are quite good and the sewing machine tuning tips you get with the kits are good to have.

Get a decent sail and copy the individual panels, then all you are learning is sticking the thing together and not trying to develope a clever shape at the same time.

P

Copying a sail that way would be "stealing" somebody elses intellectual property, or at the least very bad form in my opinion (sorry).
In real life, it would be a question of what the objective of the exercise was. Was it to learn saildesign and sailbuilding, doing it from the bottom up with several re-cuts would be better. It would also develop the "eye" for a good shape far more. If only an affordable copy of a standard sail was the objective, it could work. I would not want to try it with a radial or tri radial sail, too much work and potential problems <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Design issues aside,unless you're going to do glued sails it's all about the sewing machine, especially on mainsails. There's nothing like a flywheel machine with a compound walking foot that will do triple pick zig-zags, with the forward-reverse set just right so it needles through the same holes on the lock stitch without dropping stitches or sending broken needle shards flying at your eyes.......uuuuhhhhmmmm....walking foot..uuhmhm....

Actually, their is no "intellectual property" protection when such is used in combination with an object that is for your own use only.

"Intellectual property" only limits the economic exploitations of it.

So as long as you don't sell copies or use them to settle debts then everybody is free to copy anything, irrespectibally of patents awarded or designations of "intellectual property".

Wouter

There's something to be said for taking apart a sail and copying it and stitching it together. In the past I've learned a lot from taking things apart to get an idea how they work. But I wouldn't it be a better idea to get some cloth and practice cutting and stitching on smaller pieces? It might be a nice break from the cerebral work of learning about saildesign and actually designing a sail. I'm not against copying per sé as long as it's done to gain an understanding of the processes involved, after all a lot of great artists have started that way.
Would a good domestic sewing machine be good enough, or am I going to struggle with it or, even worse, break the machine?

Great info so far, thanks all

If you're not doing this to a. learn about sailmaking; or b. indulge in masochism;

Just go have the sails made.

(I have a Sailrite LSZ and a Pfaff as well, and I do canvas work and sail repair, for what that's worth. I have my sails built at a loft.)

Sailmaking is WAY hard unless you're equipped for it (and even if you are equipped for it.)

As in, having a nice big loft floor to make the layout and sewing itself easier... having a triple-zag machine (which Sailrite LSZ isn't)...a grommet press...handy-billy to stretch the luff rope...

mainly that nice loft floor to pin your sail out and to keep the sail under control as you're sewing.

For the hassle involved, it's well worth it to pay the sailmaker. please believe me. (If you just want to learn, go offer your time to the sailmaker - he needs cheap help, 'cause he ain't making much money.)

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.

For starting somewhere, I'd say a cat sail is a good place, the loads aren't too high, usually no reef points, loose foot is one less bolt rope to stitch, and you generally aren't going out to the middle of the ocean where your life sort of counts on it.
Plus you can compare it side by side with sails of known speed potential and see if you're getting anywhere on shape...on the machine side again, it really helps to have the special foot attachments like the assymetric one for getting tight up against the bolt rope, and maybe a folder for the edging. On the jib, are you going to do hanks or zipper luff? It's hard to sew the two sides of the zip so they are both the same length when you are done, as it has to be separated during sewing. Maybe we should get a whole sewing sticky going...

Thanks for all the great input, especially from you Rolf, I will try to post questions regularly as I progress. First of all I'll have to get my knowledge in order. I'm currently reading Frank Bethwaite's "High performance Sailing" and lot of things that happened to me in the past start making sense now. I will get "Art and science of sails". Any thoughts about CA Marchaj's "Sail performance" and perhaps "Aero-Hydro dynamics of sailing"? Perhaps somebody knows good books about craft of sailmaking. I see it this way, whether I'm going to make my own sails or not, a sailor can never know too much about sails.

no need to take it apart, just flatten out and trace each panel individually.

After tracing the panels, you're going to have to compensate for the shrinkage caused by the stitching, if you just resew them as is you'll end up with a smaller sail, that might be skewed depending on the bias of the original cloth, different thread tensions on the original machine,etc. How much to compensate? Welcome to the core question that separates having ideas about sails from actually making them...
Just for an example, everybody in the hang gliding industry had to go to temperature controlled lofts, if you sewed one half of the sail one day and the other half later, it would be slightly off from the other side, you could never see it by eye, but you could sure feel it in flight as one wing would keep trying to fly ahead of the other one in a way that was hard to tune out...you could also fly different gliders of the same model, and even tuned the same one of them would just fly "wrong" somehow...

The combination of mast bend characteristics (which change according to diamond wire setup) and luff curve balanced against sail cloth (the less stretch the better) is all important. As Tami said, you will be far better ahead to work for a sailmaker for free. I expect after one day, a thousand dollars will seem like a great deal.