In anticipation of our new genoa arriving in a few weeks, we thought it would be a good time to replace the forestay, hidden so nicely underneath our Harken roller furling unit for who knows how long.

We were a little nervous about disassembling the roller furling unit. The last time we attempted such a project it was on Jenny P and we mangled the old Profurl unit so badly we ended up trashing it and buying a hank-on jib.

Needless to say we don’t want to deal with hank-on sails on Rivendell nor do we have the budget for a new roller furling unit, so we carefully disconnected the 18 year old Harken MKI unit from the forward chainplate, then hoisted Michael aloft to disconnect the mast end. We tied a line carefully to the top then (with Michael back on the dock) veeery carefully lowered the entire unit to the dock. All was well until we realized that we’d lowered the thing parallel to the boat, i.e. it was laying ACROSS the dock so that whoever walked or rolled a cart down the dock would have to walk or roll right over it.

At this point, we gathered up some neighbors, hoisted the unit aloft again, then carefully repositioned it on the main dock walkway so it was out of the way. Phew.

Michael was sweating as he began to disassemble the drum. We had feared horribly seized and corroded screws but to our surprise it came apart easily. Finally all we were left with were the foils on the old cable.

At this point, we could examine several feet of the cable and were VERY thankful we’d undertaken this project. Many of the strands at the bottom were almost worn through — not good at all.

So now we had the foils all lined up nicely on the old wire. Since we had planned on having the new fittings swaged on, we needed to get the foils apart to free the connectors that held them together. The problem with this is that the old Harken systems held the foils together using roll pins. Well, somewhere along the way the previous owner had replaced the roll pins with screws, then cut off the screw heads. This fixed, we were guessing, the problem of the screw pins coming undone at inopportune times, but now the screws were permanently stuck on the foils. These puppies weren’t coming apart for nothing.

At this point, we did what any desperate amateur riggers do and consulted Google. A quick search for “Harken roll pins” took us to a site describing a Harken replacement foil kit for the older style foils held together with roll pins. We’d guessed that such a thing would cost a fortune, but the whole foil kit was only around $500. A bargain considering the whole furling unit is a ghastly $3K.

The dilemma with this furling system set up is that the narrow foil connectors must be installed on the wire before the ends are swaged on, then (assuming the foil assembly is apart) you slide the foils on one at a time over the stud fitting at the end of the stay, then screw each foil to its connector one at a time. So, not being able to take apart our foils we’d have to use a mechanical fitting at the end (i.e. a Norseman or Stay-lok). But then we feared that since the screws holding the foils and connectors together are larger than the original roll pins that the screws could be chafing on the wire.

A quick snip of the wire with the cable cutters holding the end stud fitting and we pulled the old wire out from the foils. Our first glance down the wire confirmed there was definitely a problem with the screws — there were many points along the wire where the screws had been digging into the wire and slowing grinding it away over time. This was not acceptable to us for hopefully obvious reasons so we called Harken and ordered up the replacement foil kit.

To be continued….