In practice this didn’t work so we reverted back to the previous system. More thought required.
On faceplate we follow articles by Thomson Boat Works who customise 505s and noticed this one about an auto-adjusting mast ram:
As we are suffering from Covid Lockdown boredom and the fact the pole is finished we decided to see if we could do something similar with our lowers. On a couple of occasions, we’ve changed rake and forgotten to change the lowers. Especially when mucking about onshore and doing large rake changes, we’ve inverted the rig a couple of times, and as we had time, decided to do something about it.
2:1 matching the rate of change form forestay
The lowers were anchored to a carbon plate on the back of the mast step, so in order to make it adjustable, we decided to make the anchoring point adjustable. Does make gearing the system a bit more difficult but it seemed the simplest way.
First iteration was to just do a straight 1:1 connection, a Harken 18mm Fly block attached to the same anchoring point. There was too much travel so we changed to 2:1 by adding a Harken 16mm block to the system and attaching both tails of the existing purchase system to the block.
This created an odd gearing to the system so it isn’t a completely 1:1 setup, but it does mean that the further you rack back the tighter the lowers get, so it works out about right. We are using same 2mm spectra line as for the rest of the lowers system.
The other challenge this creates is we rely on the lowers to rig the boat as we will need to think up how to rig the boat.
