Does anyone know how tape drive sails are manufactured, they seem a possible way for home manufacture as the sail is a sewn broad seam ( very few seams ) and the tape is available.

The film is broadseamed and glued. Then the trick is to fold/fan the sail so the part you are taping is lying flat. They have some nice dispensers where you put on several lines of tape in one go.

Is there a public source for the tape and the mylar films?

Wayne,

I make Tape Drive sails a fair bit. A little more to it than laying the tape thru a special dispenser and you can only lay one tape at a time.

It is a very good way to make light weight and increadibly strong sails. If made correctly it will hold its shape a very long time.

You could have a go at it your self as the materials are as readily available as any other sail cloth.

However probably best left to the experts. If you really want to make your own sails, then dacron is your friend. But what would i know:)

Goodonya Aido - I reckon you might know a bit. String laminate works for me - light, strong and quick. I know some blokes who do a really good job too!!!

Cheers
John Dowling
Seawind 24 179
A Class AUS9
A Class AUS747
Stingray 589
Arrow 1696 sponsor

Hiya Aido,

what I saw at the time was a special dispenser with several tapes besides each other being used. Looked funky.
The real trick was the layout of the tapes and the reinforcing I was told. I am no sailmaker so if you are you know a lot better.

Now dacron is not that good on a cat imo if you use a crosscut layout. Stuff like Diax and Maxx is better I think. Opinions?

Aido,

How about a quick paragraph on how you would make a taped sail.

Do you know of any videos on the process ?

The way they look and hold shape I think are excellent and the fact that you can broadseam the main construction would lead me to think that it would be possible to make a fairly good quality sail at home.

Any tips and tricks then

Thanks

C'mon Wanyne.

Best tip i can give you is to save some time and probably money and get one from a loft that specialise in tape drive. Seriously.

Tape drive makes excellent f16 sails. Some of the Aussie blades have some. It is far superiour to Radial sails.

But if you want some serious bling, you got to go for string.

I think you are probably right but being an out of work fellow right now, bling is probably not what I have to spend money on sadly. Anyway I've been hankering after building a sail from scratch as I feel I would learn to understand the sail better.

Start with building a Dacron jib. Dacron still builds nice fast sails and in some ways it is more user friendly on the water. It just doesn't have the shape holding abilities of laminates. You will definetly learn a lot from that. And it will not cost heaps.

Tape drive and string are 2 different products. With a string sail the fibres are laminated between the mylar films. Ace has some of the ones we built on his seawind. They turned out very nice. My workplace is one of the only lofts in the world that can do string sails completely in house. Every sail is unique to the customers boat and requirements.

I plan to put some on the f16 early next year. The cloth itself will be better than anything you can buy. The challenge lies in coming up with a design that is fast. Not so easy. I'm sure I can get close to start with. Designing something from scratch with no knowlege would be a very difficult challenge.

If I can work out how to put pictures on this place I'll put them on. It's quite interesting if that's what your in to.

Making a tape drive headsail at the end of the week. I'll get some photos of the process but not exactly how it's done.

What is the tape called and who is the maufacturer?

That would be appreciated as I'm sure I'm not the only one n this forum who is interested in sail making.

If you google Windsurf sail making you can get some interesting videos on how people make custom windsurf sails, quite instructive but one can never make up for the real world experiance of good loft sail makers.

They are also significant weight savers ! The difference between the Aussie Blade tape drive and my own pentex radial mainsail felt like it was enormous.

I guessed that as much a 2 kg was saved on the sail alone. I think my battens are heavier then the ones used by the Aussie blade as well.

Wouter

Cant work out how to upload any photos. Bummer.

Basically the way they are made is as follows.

First the sail is designed as a normal cross cut sail. Generally the seams can be narrower because the tape takes most of the loads in the sail.

The tricky part is working out the load paths. If your lucky enough you have a computer program that put the load lines on to the sail. There can be some variations in the layout depending on you line on thinking. You can work out a denier or fibre count from the tape layout and type of fibre that you are using. If you dont have the cool software you can use a lofting batten to mark the lines on the sail in the pattern you want once the sail is one piece.

We generally use carbon or kevlar tapes that are supplied by various sail cloth manfacturers. You could make your own out of strips of sticky mylar and dry fibre. You just have to lay the tape down the line that you have drawn on the sail. Then finish the sail as normal.

The main advantage Tape construction has over Radial is weight saving and shape retention. In radial sails not all of the fibre ends up running in the direction of the loads. You basically end up with fibre in the sail that is not doing anything or not in the right orientaion. The tapes in a tape drive sail attempt to run in exactly the direction that the load is travelling. The tapes also concentrate in the corners of the sail were the load is the highest. And spread out as the loads spread in the sail. Concentrating the tapes in the corners also means you need minimal additional reinforcing. Also saving wieght.

The biggest wieght saving comes from the ability to use a really light base cloth. The base film does not really need to be that strong. It just needs to fill the gaps in the tapes.

The same theory is used in all the string sail technology. But tape doesn't require massive amounts of money and infrastructure. So its cheaper.

Cool way to build sails. Wouldn't recommend that you try it at home tho.

Send these to Wouterhijink(at)hotmail.com and I'll post them for you.

Thanks for your efforts in explaining the tape drive sails.

Wouter

To post images try this (they need to be small).

Or you need to host them somewhere else and link to them to make them bigger.

I have to react to this topic, I've been very busy lately and haven't had much time for this forum.
but I managed for more than 2 years a very succesfull product called STRATIS from Doyle Sails NZ Ltd. we can make Custom-laid fibre-aligned sail laminates sails for any boat......
we made laminates for paper tigers till sails for the new Kokomo III.
these sails are much lighter, hold their shape longer trough the whole wind range and are much stronger and can be specificly designed for your boat within the class rules.
have a look on the website www.doylestratis.com and if you need more info don't hesitate to contact me

we use a few different type of tapes to stick our panels together important thing is you dont want a tape that grows mould inside, because then you get green lines in your sail