Keeping An Eye On Your Sailboat’s Rigging
J. Maloney, Maloney Marine Rigging
Inspecting the components of your sailboat’s rigging should be part of your regular boat maintenance program. As the boat owner you can provide the first insights into the condition of the rig before turning to a professional for further testing or recommendations. Two logical times to look at your boat’s rigging are in the fall when the boat is hauled and in the spring when it’s time to get ready for boating season.
More and more these days sailboats are hauled and stored with the mast and rigging in place. That complicates the inspection process, but should not keep you from doing it. A little time in a bosun’s chair can actually be a lot of fun if you like heights.
The three areas addressed here are the standing rigging, the running rigging, and the lifelines.
Standing Rigging
Most production sailboat standing rigging is 1x19 construction stainless steel wire terminated with swage fittings. Swage fittings are compressed onto the wire with dies, providing an end with an eye, fork or threaded stud for attachment. This creates a very strong joint, but the dies do work harden the stainless fitting in the swaging process – making it more susceptible to crevice corrosion and fracture. Usually a swage fitting will fail before the wire or any turnbuckle or clevis pin in the assembly.
Fractures in swage fittings can be found with a visual inspection. Rust and small cracks will appear. Note where lines of rust are and use a scotch-brite pad to remove the rust. The fracture will usually be jagged, and often near the lip of the fitting. Deck level swage fittings get the most exposure to salt water, and they are inverted – allowing salt water to sit along the wire entry — hence the deck level fittings usually degrade before the fittings aloft.
Any fracture in a swage fitting requires replacement of the fitting. The fracture you see may be small, but if the crack started on the inside of the swage shank you may be seeing only the tip of the iceberg.
The beauty of 1x19 wire (19 single strands laid together to form the wire rope) is that individual strands will fail instead of the whole wire parting catastrophically. Check around the lip of the swage fitting to feel if any strands have broken just inside the swage shank. A broken strand will have popped slightly away from the bundle, and will feel looser than the others. As the remaining strands pick up the load in tension, they will fail in time.
The second most common method of terminating standing rigging is with a three part threaded mechanical fitting consisting of a body, an insert, and the desired eye, fork or threaded stud. The leading brand names of these fittings are Norseman, Sta-Lok, and Hi-Mod and all work on the same principle. These fittings are more expensive than swage fittings, but will last the life of the rig. An advantage to these fittings is that hey can be disassembled to inspect the wire strands captured within the fittings. Remember, when disassembled, the insert (cone or wedge) must be replaced.
Solid stainless steel rod rigging has gained acceptance on many performance oriented sailboats. This is specialized rigging and an authorized rod rigging service center should be contacted to inspect this product.
Running Rigging
These days the trend is toward all rope running rigging. Wire and wire-to-rope halyards can be replaced with composite rope that has an equivalent strength and ultra low stretch characteristics. The resulting assemblies are easier to handle and kinder to all the surfaces they touch. Sheave boxes - whether wood, aluminum, or carbon - are not chafed and worn if bad leads occur. Spar and boat paint is not abraided by flogging stainless steel wire. “Fishhooks” of broken wire strands no longer result in cursing and blood spattered teak decks!
A visual inspection of rope along its length, and close scrutiny of any splices is all that is needed to insure the running rigging is sound.
Lifelines
Lifelines are often ignored, seldom relied on, yet potentially critical. Like highway guardrails, you hope you’ll never need them, but if you do they better be sound! Most production boats have vinyl-coated wire and swaged terminations. Inspecting the swage fittings is the same process as on your standing rigging.
The trend with lifelines is to eliminate the vinyl coating and use uncoated 1x19 stainless wire. Without the vinyl coating, the wire itself is visible for inspection. These lines aren’t quite as smooth as the vinyl coated, but certainly easier to keep an eye on.
Some cost sensitive boat manufacturers use hand-crimped swage fittings for their lifelines. These swage shanks are thinner walled, and are compressed with a nico-press tool, not rolled through swage dies. The holding power of these hand-crimped terminations is less than a machine swaged fitting. A hand-crimped fitting will not have a smooth finish – it will be a series of compressions along the shank. You get what you pay for.
For simplicity, weight savings, and cost reduction, lifelines may be terminated with a lashing instead of a turnbuckle. Lashings, if done correctly, are a sound alternative to turnbuckles. They should be changed regularly to insure against chafe and UV degradation.
Your sailboat is a complex system of standing and running rigging and for maximum performance and longevity should be regularly inspected. Either inspect all at once before and after your boating season, or create a schedule of progressive inspection. Either way you’ll have peace of mind and confidence that when the wind pipes up and you’ve got all sails set and are heading down the bay, everything will stay together.