Anyone know of a company, other than sailrite, that offers sail kits for you to put together?

Any sailmakers you think might be open to the idea?

Approach them in the slow season.
Best would be if you had a cutfile ready for the sailmaker. Then you would be buying time on his cutting machine and for cutting/packaging, not his intellectual property.

Sailmakers do this for a living. Either he see easy money in cutting and supplying materials or he see somebody out to take money away from him by not letting him spend time assembling and finishing. Might also be percieved as a PR/quality/hassle issue. All in the mindset of the sailmaker.

It is not wrong to ask


Why not go with Sailrite? I have built a few of their kits and they are OK.

Rolf,
I like sailrite and by now I have made 2 jibs and a large screacher from them. I am interested in making a new main and not 100% sure of their capability to design a main for a multihull.... And making a main is gonna be a BIG project by the time you think of full length battens and reef points.

We use Sailrite kits (at least the cut panels) to make Isotope sails, including pin-top and square-top pentex mainsails. So, Sailrite does have some familiarity with designing fully-battened mains for catamarans. The Sailrite cut is fuller (more camber) than other designs, and necessitated some trim changes (mostly downhaul and mast rotation). It is performing well against North and Smyth sails.

My mainsail doesn't have reef points, but we did put a couple on JP's main for the North Carolina Challenge.

I hope that helps,
Eric

Eric,
Thanks for the info.
As a follow up, I emailed Hunter Riddle of Shurr sails and he designed a main for me and is going to send me the panels (although I have to cut them out, they are plotted). Game on, this will be a challenge.