Today was a trip to the east bay to pick up the self-steering vane from ScanMar in Richmond. The wind vane component will get mounted atop a new arch at the back of the boat, and the white cables in the photo here are what connect the pendulum vane to a trim tab on the back of the rudder. I didn’t photo enough of the air vane at the top to get a complete picture, but this is just the start of this story.

In the second photo, see the stainless rod that serves as the hinge pin for the trim tab. On this display model, everything is external and not particularly hydro-dynamic high performance. So the next stop today was a visit to the design studio of Jim Antrim with our rudder in hand. He will draw up a recommendation for cutting the rudder to make part of the trailing edge the trim tab. Rick Holway will be glad to know that Jim designed a similar modification to the big local tri Defiance’s rudder; it was exciting to have him pull up those build plans on his computer today. That project was tricky as the control rods had to run up through the rudder post (because it’s under-the-boat rudder) Ours won’t be that intricate because it’s external, but we still have considerable work to build internal bearings and a carbon hinge running from top to bottom. Lots more to come on this topic over the next month.

And here was a very satisfying spend at the Oakland boat show. With the myriad choices out there for sailing hardware, I decided to (1) go with stainless steel to match our shiny Anderson winches and (2) buy local. The Garhauer company in Upland, CA were original suppliers to Corsair, and F27 Origami still has most of her 23yr old Garhauer gear working well. This is a family business doing their own manufacturing, and I spent an hour in their boat show booth picking out this loot:

This is most of the sail handling gear, plus the anchor roller and the solid stainless steel forestay chainplate. The rest will come from Colligo, in conjunction with all the synthetic standing rigging (no wires).
It’s fun to see how big this stuff is compared to our prior boats. The jib cars are the size of decent hamburgers! And that’s a big size 52 winch in the photo.

Almost ready to show you final photos of the daggerboard and hull-side net lashings, but there’s still just a bit more filling and sanding to do. Apparently the entire Memorial Day weekend wasn’t enough :)