[quote=talbot]I would be interested in ways of reducing weight aloft with some of these new super-strong fibres, but I'm overwhelmed with the choices.[/quote]
K.C. Walker wrote:For halyards I went with single braid Amsteel. I simply replaced the wire halyard and reused the original three strand halyard tails. It's very easy to splice, it's super light and in this application has basically no stretch. The only problem I've had so far is if I happened to let go of the halyard while connecting to a sail it flies up the mast so fast there is no way I can catch it.
What K.C. says; except I never had the wire halyards. I did splice basic double braid as tails on lengths of Amsteel. I describe that in this
post in my
thread in the
rigging section of the forum.
The splicing instructions that I found on
http://L36.com were really straightforward, and easy enough to follow; with the right instructions, even a beginner can get splices to work perfectly in Amsteel. It's that easy to work with.
The downside of splicing a tail onto the Amsteel is that, when the sail is down, one half of the halyard is much lighter than the other: if you ever let go of it, it will disappear up on the mast, as K.C. describes. Even more so, if you replace the eye+shackle with a soft shackle, or an integrated soft-shackle. I've trained myself to secure the free end of the halyard immediately when taking it off the head of the sail. That has prevented any real problems for now.