New jib halyard

My jib halyard have been having a rough time lately.

Wear on the outer cover make it slip in the halyard clutch, and the only fix I could pull off was to tie a knot by the shackle to move the worn part further up the mast.

I don't know much about the existing running rig. It is a 6 mm rope, with a white core and polyester core. The previous owner said it was "dyneema". 20 meters long, and on the first 8.9m of it the protective polyester is removed (tapered?), assumed to save weight in the mast.

I'm replacing it with FSE Robeline Admiral 7000 (SK78 dyneema core with polyester cover) from http://www.maritim.no/ .

Weighing it, the old halyard was 0.367kg, including the head shackle.

New one is 0.459 kg with head shackle (about 30grams) spliced on. 0.560 kilos originally. I've removed the cover on the last 8.9 meters, mostly because that was done on the old halyard.

This took me a couple of evenings, doing it for the first time and all that. I guess I'd spend maybe an hour or two if I were to do it again now.

Lessions learned

  • The core of white/red Admiral 7000 is ... red, slightly less pleasing aestetically than white.
  • There is an extra tiny strand of a different material in the middle of the core. My guess is that this strand stretches less than the other normal strands.
  • Putting the core back into the cover takes a long time. When you open the outer cover with 8m on one side, and 12m on the other; make sure that you pull out the core from the right (8 meter) part and not from the 12m part.
  • Do the eye splice last. When tapering the cover, you need a 20-30cm tail of the cover to put inside the core. This means you have to pull the 8m section of core through the 30cm cover, which means that the shackle can't be spliced on just yet.
  • Splicing dyneema isn't really splicing like you would with a stranded rope. You just put the core inside of the core.
  • Admiral 7000 6mm with (from spec) 25 grammes per meter, and it has a breaking strength of 3518 kg.

Final result