There’s enough to get your mind around when you start radio sailing, isn’t there?! You take some pieces of kit for granted naturally (!).

Probably within one or two outings, you’ll have adjusted, or simply fiddled with, your mainsheet post and perhaps wondered, “What’s down there?”…. “can you adjust the friction?” etc

Probably most of us (UK) are using Sailsetc mainsheet posts. Both mine are made of a kind of slippery PTFE type material and the crucial thing above deck are the entry and exit holes.

https://www.sailsetc2.com/index.php/sheet-post.html

On my IOM, the post is at a racy angle,… and on the Marbleheads it is simply vertical.

The post slides snugly into a tube below deck. What’s underneath?? Well, carefully slide it out and let’s take a look at what you will see…..

The most crucial thing is that you will immediately see how to adjust the sliding friction. Your post might feel just right and hold its position. You probably know that the general idea is (1) adjust the post as high as is feasible on sailing day so that your mainsheet run to the boom is near horizontal (2) on a gusty day, consider sliding the post down little to make the rig slightly more springy.

There are three components down there:-

A nylon bolt (white in this example) which screws into a pre-tapped hole in the bottom of the post. On this one, you just need a flat head screwdriver or a weeny spanner.

There’s your first adjustment right there. The limit of how far you can push the post down the tube is set by that screw head which will sit at the bottom of the tube in its furthest down position. The further you screw it in, the lower your post can sit.

On the post is an adjuster nut (black in this example) then a little rubber washer on the end. There’s your second adjuster. The tighter that nut screws the rubber washer to the bottom of the post, the more the rubber washer bulges…. the more it presses on the wall of the tube… the stiffer your height adjustment gets.

That’s it !! Pull your post out and take a look!! Clever in its simplicity.

A story of a third adjustment:

We may be wrong, but yesterday it looked on my Marblehead B and C rigs as if my mainsheet post did not quite want to go down low enough. It was catching the boom on both rigs as they travelled across, and I couldn’t quite deploy enough kicker to close the leech enough… so I had a free leech kind of sailing day.

I was hoping to simply screw the adjuster in a couple of mm’s to get the minimum post height down a bit. No such luck…. the screw was right in. So in a fleet conference (!) we resolved that I should instead take 5mm off the post.

See that little black mark on the post casing above?

You don’t want to go lower than the exit eye clearing the deck (see top photo), but there’s essentially lots of adjustment available in the tube once you get the limits right.

In a gentle vice, I found it reasonably easy to cut with a very fine hacksaw and cleaned up with a file. Taking 1-2mm off would have been tricky, but 5mm was fine.

Then, as you’d guess (Murphy’s law applies), the screw hole wasn’t quite deep enough to get the adjuster screw in. I didn’t fancy making the hole deeper and re-tapping the thread. There was a generous amount of thread showing on the bolt, so I resolved to take 5mm off the end – a Stanley knife and a snipper did the job rather nicely.

Should be OK – we need another 15mph gusting 30mph day to give it a trial run.