Category Archives: Backup Equipment and Tools

How to Neatly Finish Your Rigging Lines

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When you get your first radio sailing yacht, inevitably when you look around the rigging, you are going to wonder how owners very neatly finish off their lines with a very abrupt knot

If your mainsail is secured to the mast via fine rope eyes, take a look at how they are finished. Let yourself wonder, “how do they do that?”

I borrowed an IOM to try and get started, and had to ask the Fleet Captain how it was done. He used two basic bits of kit.

1/ Put an overhand knot to finish the line/lines. It’s easy to slide an overhand knot along and get it in exactly the right place.

2/ Use Superglue over the knot head to LOCK it down. Wet your fingers first – you don’t want to end up glued to your IOM or Marblehead, like one of those ‘Stop Oil’ protestors. Let it set.

I bought from WH Smith, this pack of three mini tubes of superglue. I reckon if you buy a single larger tube, one day you’ll be desperate to use it and it’ll have set like a rock or just gone off.

3/ The next challenge is to remove the tails on the other side of the overhand knot.

If you cut with a scissors or knife, it just won’t be perfect. It might even wriggle out of the knot over time, or leave a fraying end line.

So try one of these ‘thread zappers’ in the photo above. I don’t know what kind of handicraft uses these. It’s basically a battery powered hot knife on a small scale. You just place the hot tip on the thread/s close up to the waste side of the knot. Press the button and it melts the cord off with an immaculate finish.

Very cheap on Amazon. I carry one in my toolbox all the time now.

Three More Essentials for Your Beginner’s Toolbox

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Three more essentials for your Day One Tool Box.

1/ adjustable spanner… this might be overload but I have seen others using similar to this. So I bought one.

Notice the size!!

2/ Tweezers

If you see 20 competitors in a car park, they probably have 30 tweezers between them.

And if you see a boat with really tricky hull tubes, you might find that there is a trick to pull them through with a hoover. Honestly.

Get them as long in length as you can I think

3/ You simply have to have a small scissors and a stanley knife.

Now you can go sailing!!

What’s In Your Toolbox? Allen-keys and Screwdrivers and….

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When I came to radio sailing, an early realisation was that my lifetime sailing tools and their toolboxes were going to be useless. An interesting challenge with radio sailing is, relative to big boats, the smallness of everything.

You need some basic tools on hand, just right at the start – to give you confidence apart from anything else.

These are the first four things I dropped in my new radio sailing toolbox.

1/ If you see any hex nuts, they are going to be small. For example, shroud rigging screws on an IOM. I bought these:-

2/ So far, I’d say slightly more in demand, some good allen keys. I have found so far that 2.5 size is in high demand. From my cycling days I had a lovely set of allen keys, going right down to 2mm and having the magic 2.5mm. However, the keys have quite long stems … possibly 10cm. I think you also need something shorter, and you anyway should be carrying two sets to protect yourself against losses. I what I went for with the second set was these (below). It’s got the magic 2.5mm, plus they have short stems for tight spaces but I really, really like the colour coding.

3/ I’ve not had to break open the screwdrivers yet, but where there are screws they are jolly small. For the moment I have packed a set of these

4/ Again different to big boat sailing, I felt I needed some glue in the box. If I have superglue in the box for rigging knots, then I thought I might need something a bit milder – non impact adhesive to allow wiggle room. I bought this silicone glue. I see it has already been used!

So that was my four part toolbox for day one of radio sailing. Oh – I bought some long tweezers too. More about those in another post.