Rigging

[rrees]

Our boat is based on the French Spanish boarder, med side.
We are looking to change the rigging in the near future as it is now 10 years old but has had little use as the boat was laid up for a few years in a cradle and has always been cradle based in the Winter.
So we are a bit loathed to change it as the insurance has not insisted on it being done.
Question is
Do we change it if so, where would be the cheepest place to get the rigging made.
Do we haul it back to the UK and getting a rigging spacialist to make it up.
Order from our local Beneteau dealer
A company in France or possibly spain.
We have a local repairer who can install the rigging and also supply if required but we are looking at all the options available.

Thanks

RR

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[charles_reed]

Marine Technology
10bis ave Louis Lumiere,
Zone Industrielle Perigny
17184 Perigny
Charente Maritime

Speak with Lulu (not a girl) he's the manager of this the Z-Spars rigging subsidiary (and speaks colloquial English) tel 05 46 45 42 02 fax 05 46 45 27 55. He'll require you to fax through the dimensions from T-slot to chainplates.

Prices about 50% of those in UK and 70% of riggers in France and even less than the Spanish. They use 16mm chromed bronze turnbuckles, not cheap & cheerful 12mm 316 stainless as do Soromap and all the others.

You're welcome to mention my name.

Perigny is the industrial suburb of la Rochelle - you can save another €120 or so by collecting.

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[AndrewB]

There has been a lot of debate here as to whether it is strictly necessary to change stainless rigging every 10 years (the advisory period), as it often lasts perfectly well for 30 years or more.

But even if your insurers are not insisting on a change you must get it properly inspected as they would be well within their rights to refuse to cover an accident caused by older, unmaintained rigging.

One much cheaper alternative to re-rigging, which my insurers have agreed to, is to have the terminals electronically tested every so often. A company which will do this is Maidsure in Southampton, tel: 02380 472422. (I have no connection other than as a customer).

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[roly_voya]

The '10 year life' for rigging seams to me to be totally abitory. The advice I have had from metal specialists is that stressing stainless above aprox 10% causes it to go brittle and fail, below that has no effect which is the reason we are not advised to chainge the chainplates! So if you run a high speck racer with ultra light rigging and sail hard you might need to change every couple of year. On the other hand if you have a heavy motor sailer and only sail in good weather then it might last almost indefinately. Most long distance yachts have oversize rigging to stand up to the prolonged cyclic loads of ocean sailing and this cirtainly stands up to at least one circumnavigation. Does anyone no if, for example the challenge boats always chainge rig each time round? because if they do it every 10 years that is probably several times round the world.
To get a usful measure of rig life we would need to look at rig size against maximum righting moment, milage and type of sailing however it might be interesting to see what people get just in terms of milage so whats the record no of miles without failure? and if you have had a rig fail was it wire, fittings or anchor points? Mabe we can get the insurence world to make a morerealistic assessment based on what we've got and what we do reather than some abitory 'average' based on some lightwight budget priced production boat.

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[charles_reed]

Rigging failure

having had a fatigue failure mode on a mast I went into the facts with some care during my (unsuccessful) battle with insurers.

1. 316 almost invariably fails as the result of work-hardening and consequent fatigue. The next most likely cause is crevice corrosion. these two combine to give us a most-likely failure list:-
1.1. Outer elements of the rigging wire at lower bottlescrews - that's why it's a good idea to waterproof (with a good organic grease like lanolin) lower swages. the cause of failure is 3-fold - compression of the wire-element whilst the fitting is being swaged, hand-swaging devices are notoriously unreliable and things like Norseman and Stalock particularly good - lack of free movement or unfair angles on chainplate and, finally, crevice corrosion. All the rigging failures I've had have been at the upper swage and have never been suddenly destructive. (None have been older than 13 years) and 1 secondary failed 3 months before it was due for replacement.
1.2. Fatigue failure of ss bottlescrews, usually at the base of the upper nut. That is why it is far better to have bronze bottlescrews and not 316 stainless.

Ultrasound is great for discovering hidden fissures, and would probably show up some flaws in some brand-new gear, but is only of value in predicting an imminent gravity storm.

The underwriters' 10-year rule shows a conspicuous lack of understanding of the mechanics of rigging deterioration (to long for hard-sailed fractional racers and far too short for the majority of masthead-rigged cruising boats).

Unfortunately there's no easy, short, answer to the original posting, but, bought in right places, rigging is such small change that I find it hard to understand the hue and cry - after all it's not much more than 2 years quality antifouling.

I change caps and inners every 7 years, the rest every 10 years. The last price, for 9mm caps for a 15.5m rig cost me €160 including overnight delivery

2. There is, as you point out, a world of difference between the stresses on standing rigging dependent on load.
For example on a bendy mast fractional rog fully tensioned, in a good breeze, it is impossible to maintain tension on the lee shrouds. This means that all the load is being taken on windward caps and outers whilst the lee inner is trying to stop the mast bending in the x-x axis. Under these circumstance the loads involved are in the order of x4 normal. So fractional rig boats punish their standing rigging far more than masthead rigged. #1 fractional rigged boats need their

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