|
Building a vane |
||
  |
Building a wind vane was a long process. My friend Jay and I read Letcher's "Self Steering for Sailing craft" over and over again. We looked at a website by Walt Murray and after spending a little time on a prototype we arrived at the basic design. Jay is responsible for the nuts and bolts of putting it together - especially the linkage. All in all it's more similar to other vane designs than different. The main way that it's different is that it costs only a couple hundred bucks to put it together and it's made from off the shelf components. No cast pieces or proprietary crap - just stainless ball bearings, stainless tubing, aluminum tubing, bevel gears, wood, and stainless nuts and bolts. You could carry two complete spares on your boat and it would still weigh less than a monitor windvane! The other day I was out sailing with the vane and it was sailing a broad reach moving the boat along at 1.5 knots and there was less than a couple knots of apparent wind. Ask anyone that designs or uses vanes and they'll tell you that's the biggest problem area - downwind in light air. It passed those test with flying colors. This vane is available for sale now too - my friend Aaron has decided to build them for people. It's known as Wind Scout Self Steering - we'll have a web page up for it soon. If you're interested in buying one before the web page gets going then contact me and I'll put you in touch with Aaron. |
|