Lena
Invader 22
Top furler unit home allsorts *** ***

The old head roller unit when first stripped.

Cleaned up, with a new locking screw tapped in and the top lug drilled out with an extra lower 6mm eye - the lug the Duralac'd, several coats, before fitting the new stainless cheeks

Below - the new toggle fitting, using one of the new toggle swage ends, minus the T-bar - it fits the mast clevis pin, which is quite a close fitting to the masthead moulding..

Having considered a new furling unit - I settled on what I had. Though old, it was simple and very well engineered. see here for the foil pics.

My one concern with the top unit was the upper lug - this takes the entire sail/halyard and forestay. It was showing some signs of wear.

Left is when I first opened it up. You can see the hole has elongated slightly - but the material is very thick and a high quality alloy. The lug cap and body are machined from a solid blank - its some sort of very high grade alloy - it may even be titanium, but I wouldn't know how to tell. It 'rings' bell like when you ping it.

A tiny grub screw stops it unscrewing - so I've stripped it again and tapped a M4 screw through to a indent in the thread. The top lug I've added two stainless cheeks - with a new 6mm clevis pin through the lot, lower down on the tab. Then Duralac'd the whole lug a couple of coats.

Looks a bit prettier now ! - cleaned of age old grease you can see its beautifully made and very simple. The bearing unit assembles and is locked off with the pin - which goes right through the cap and threaded rod. Then it screws into the top cap - secured with the grub screw, and my new M4 grub into the indent shown.

I had a spare swage toggle end - so was able to use it for picking up the mast head clevis pin. I wanted to put the forestay onto the outer pin - leaving the inner for a strop for the demountable extra forestay - but an 8mm shackle was tight - a toggle would not go over the thicker cheek - so this sorted it rather well.

Oct 05.

There are some advantages to this system. For one, the forestay could break - but you would still have the sail luff / halyard connecting the head unit to the drum unit. Secondly, when the forestay tensions, it also tensions the sail luff - in a way, you could tighten the halyard with the forestay reasonably slack, then when tensioned up it would also add tension to the sail luff.