Best Dacron manufacturer

[Erwin Swart]

Hi,

I am in the process to buy new sails and different sailmakers suggest other manufacturers as best.

Whats your experience?

Thanks for input

 

[PuffTheMagicDragon]

Hi,

I am in the process to buy new sails and different sailmakers suggest other manufacturers as best.

Whats your experience?

Thanks for input

You can decide for yourself. Ask for a sample of the fabric. Crush it in your fist as hard as you can, as if you are crumpling a piece of paper before throwing it into a bin. Do this repeatedly. Fabric of a lower quality owes its 'stiffness' through having a loose weave that is (temporarily) camouflaged through the use of excess resin filler. After crumpling this will show up as opaque white lines wherever the fabric was creased. Better quality fabric will have a tighter weave (=more expensive) but will have much less filler and therefore much less crease lines, if at all.


Too loose a weave means that the sail will have a shorter usable life before they become baggy.

 

[estarzinger]

Challenger has historically had the best 'mainstream' dacron, based on both the objective strength/stretch data and on empirical longevity of the sails. DP makes some pretty decent dacron and has probably closed some of the gap. Hood previously had by far the best dacron because they used some very slow looms (they bought in ireland from a high end cotton sheet and pillow case mfg going out of business) that made incredibly fine/tight weave, but hood has sadly sort of mostly slipped about of the frame due to poor management.

 

[KellysEye]

Get samples, a magnifying glass and a light. Put the light behind the fabric and see what percentage of threads to glue there are. Thread is expensive glue is cheap. The more thread there is the longer the sail will last without stretching. For comparison get a sample of Hood cloth it has the highest percentage of thread. Then choose what quality you want and the sail maker who has it.

 

[Daydream believer]

Rather than crumple a piece, fold it in half & rub a biro or back of a knife along the fold to really force it to a crease
Then you can see if the resin cracks
Regarding sail cloth, I am pleased with my Hyde Marblehead racing cloth which is made by dupont of USA
I had Bainbridge from other suppliers but found it poor quality
Look for a close tight weave one way. If the weaves go an equal number of lines each way this means that the cloth will stretch because of the "s" shape in the threads as they go over & under the threads running the opposite way. The shortest distance between two points being a straight line.
So you need a cloth that is more " unidirectional" for some parts of the sail & a "bi directional" cloth in areas of cloth build up
A radial cut sail would benefit better from the unidirection cloth as there less cross stress on the cloth & having less weave across the cloth will resist stretch more in the main stress line
With a cross cut sail the stresses go both ways so a more bi directional cloth is better. However, whilst cheaper to make it is less stable than a radially cut sail because the stretch is greater

You really need to discuss the cloth with sailmaker that you choose