Removable Furling Drum

[Farr Out]

I’m considering changing my tuff luff headfoil for a furling system with a removable drum and am looking at Selden 104s or a Profurl r250 which are about the same price, Harken being too expensive. Having downloaded the manual the Selden drum looks a real pain to easily remove and was hoping for advice from anyone with the Profurl for some practical advice. The distributor Proboat helped me with an installation guide but it wasn’t very clear.

 

[johnalison]

I have a Furlex drum. This normally needs removal only every other year to grease the mechanism that initiates furling. It is a bit of a fiddle and I always do it while ashore with the manual to hand. It is not unduly difficult however, the only fiddly bit being unclipping the two halves of main section.

 

[pagoda]

Facnor also do removable furling drums. should you wish to use the conventional grooves with a long luff/race sail or similar?
The drum splits and the two inserted spacers leave a clean forestay.
Might be worth investigating as it's easy to go back to a furling drum.

 

[lw395]

The Harken ones are very good.
Depending on your race sails, you may have to take the slot feeder/mouth piece off the foils to drop the head swivel to the deck, otherwise the usable length of foil may be too short, plus of course you can't do a twin-foil change if the first sail is shackled to the swivel.
Taking the drum and cage off and dropping the head swivel is not hard, but neither is it a 2 minute job, and there's plenty of opportunity for dropping bits in the oggin.

 

[dgadee]

I have a Schaefer one I am not using. No foil - off a 42 foot used for a staysail.

Oops. Just noticed you are talking about a completely different artefact. Apologies.

 

[Quandary]

I have a Profurl and while it operates well and comes apart relatively easily, there are a couple of things I do not like about it.
The captive shackles are a pain, I would not put up with them if we changed the head sail more often than once a year.
I do not like the way the foil sections are joined, it is not too difficult for a joint to open and closing it in situ at height, requires some uncomfortable gymnastics.
Having said that, Facnor is worse at least the Profurl grub screws have 'Allen key' heads, Facnor use ordinary Phillips screws which soon become impossible to move.
I prefer Furlex, not too sophisticated but fully developed.

Of course these obvious problems may have been sorted by now?

 

[Farr Out]

Thanks for all your replies, I didn’t know Facnor did a removable drum and it looks to have the most straightforward removal setup with less bits to drop over the side although it’s the same price as the equivalent Harken. Another option could be the Facnor flat deck furler and just alter our racing sails to suit, I’m not a purist.

 

[roaringgirl]

Thanks for all your replies, I didn’t know Facnor did a removable drum and it looks to have the most straightforward removal setup with less bits to drop over the side although it’s the same price as the equivalent Harken. Another option could be the Facnor flat deck furler and just alter our racing sails to suit, I’m not a purist.

No idea about removeable drums, but do have a think about greased, sealed bearings (eg profurl) vs dry bearings (eg harken). When our profurl seized, we got new bearings which were very stiff from new. Compare with the harken dry ones that whizz around freely. We ended up ditching the profurl and paying for the harken. For the first time in 5 years, furling the genny works like it is supposed to!