Sorry to harp on again..I'm getting there with this thing, but I'm suddenly worried about the mast position, give the latest advice from Chooks thread and reports of skittish front ends on plan LLMs. My sail will be approx 5.5m when I've cut it to shape (at a guess, its a 6.4 wave sail), I'll be sailing on sand, I'm 5'8" and 11 stone.
Judging by the photo, should I move it forward? I'd rather do it now before I've built the seat..





thanks for any advice, I know I've asked this before but I did n't specify sail size and weight of me!

Lesley

That's a great little craft!!!!!

It's hard to tell from the photo, but you seem to have the mast step standing more upright, than the 10 degrees of rake as the plans indicate.
If your mast is in the right position/distance as in the original LLM plans from the rear axle and indeed it is more upright, you will get away with it with a 5.5m2 sail.

You sound worried. So if you have a hard heart, cut it off very carefully with an 1.2mm thick ultrafine cutting disc, sacrificing/cutting ONLY the mast step and not cutting into the chassis at all. Clean up the removed mast step and chassis then shift it forward.

As stated else where, you really need a 25mm x 3mm flat bar strap (250mm long) round the bottom of the mast step to spread the load. Don't fully weld round it though. They will work without a strap, but over time they will fatigue and let you down. Trust me it did happen. This is one of my earlier yachts.



Good luck and make it so if in the future if you do need to shift the seat at all, have the ability to simply drill more holes in the seat and reposition it.
Most of my yachts seem to evolve/change parameters, so the paint job gets "blitzed" fairly early on in their life.

Hope this helps, Chook.

Thanks Chook!

Yes, its a 5 degree backwards tilt rather than 10. I reckon I'll mull it over while I build the steering..I feel like the mast step wants to creep forwards but there's always the danger I'll mess up moving it!..

Lesley

Very easy to set it back up, as the centre of the rear axle is flat. Just sit a tri square onto it (may need packers under it to clear the welds) and sight up the mast step from behind to get it upright at 90 degrees to the axle centre again.

Just make sure you wrap your mast step with cardboard and mark a template before you remove it and then just replicate the fishmouth to retain your 5 degrees.
Cut a big triangle template out of cardboard that fits in front of the mast step now as a pattern, to get it spot on when refitting it.
4 tacks of weld around the step base first and it wont alter as you weld around it completely.

Looking at your skills, you wont have any problems.