The clothes-line rig

by Philip Goode: pgoodeamrina@gmail.com

16 febrero, 2015

THE CLOTHES-LINE RIG

General
This is not an idea for a return to sail ocean carrier, but for a sail-assisted cargo motorship.
Some day, cargo ships will run on clean fuel. While we wait for that day, we might
already be avoiding 50% of harmful emissions by the use of auxiliary wind power.
Reluctance to invest in wind assistance is not surprising, since the contrivances being
proposed for simply catching wind are unrealistically expensive. This is because they
are intended to work at the flick if a switch, involving no extra crew. The clothes-line
rig is comparatively very cheap to set up and maintain, and over a ten-year period, when
the push-button wind gear would be beginning to need replacement, the cost of an extra
few hands would be infinitesimal y small.
Another reason which must be putting off ship managers is the incompatibility of rigs of
any sort with bulk cargo handling machinery at terminals. Both these problems are
addressed here.

The proposed rig

Does require specialised extra crew. According to ship size, from 3 to 5 a.b.s could cope
with the sail area involved, if the handling procedure suggested further on is followed.
The masts are deck-stepped triangular section lattice towers, braced at mid-length by
tubular bipods. Thir heads are stayed in the transverse plane, with tubular spreaders.
The clothes-line stay linking the mastheads is given a generous dip, which in a
funicular polygon such as this, significantly reduces tension. A lighter stay would link
the mastheads directly, possibly with some provision against overload due to hull
flection in extreme conditions.

The second drawing shows the ship ready to receive shore machinery. To get the sails
out of the way for harbour operations, they would each be lowered complete with all
their gear onto a broad canvas strop laid out on the hatch cover, and the primary halliard
transferred from the sail to the eye of the strop for hoisting aloft.
Sail handling policy:
The sails (all identical) would have full length battens (more than shown), in p.v.c.pipe,
which would extend the leech and also make dousing these very large sails easier. The
centre batten would be in heavier pipe, having the function of a boom. There would be
two sheets, one to act as preventer when required, also to assist the downhaul in
subduing the sail when dousing it. Each sail would be hanked to its own, very light,
guidance stay, and would have its own (secondary) halliard. All this gear would first be
hoisted by a primary halliard rigged to the clothes-line, with its fall led along the clothes
line to to the nearest mast and thence to multiple winches on deck. The guide stays need
not be rigged very tight.
The intention is that these sails would all be set as soon as the ship cleared harbour,
remaining so throughout the voyage.

Since the sails are free to rotate forward of their stay, and uncontrolled floggig is
inhibited by the battens, the way to cope with squalls would be to slack off sheets until
undue pressure was off the ship, even to fully feathering them if required.
Generally, line squalls dont last very long; this practice would avoid the labourintensive task of reefing or furling conventional sails and then re-setting them son after.
Sailcloth could be quite light in view of not having to stand up to strong winds, their luff
and leech reinforced with kevlar tape. If doused at sea, they would be triced down on
top of the hatch covers.
The lower terminal of each sails stay would be shackled to an eye in the centre of a
strop spanning the hatches or deck load and secured at each end to the scuppers, taking
advantage of the extra strength of the underlying structure.
Windward performance is never going to be brilliant in a rig with many sails in a row,
so the fact that the luffs will be somewhat short of dead-straight loses relevance.

Down-wind, it would be possible to goose-wing the sails on alternate sides, with some
benefit.

The fourth drawing shows the same total area split into six sails instead of five, making
each sail 17% easier to handle and lowering mast height.
How much or how little drivin power can a total sail area such as illustrated provide?
The ratio to displacement to the 2/3 power (metric) is 4.4 in the non-dimensional
example shown. The 1903 five-mast er Preussen had a value of 9.6 under full sail and
6.4 under working rig.
One problem remains: low bridges!! Although it would not be impossible to solve this.

pgoodeamrina@gmail.com
Palma de Mallorca, Spain, February 2015
More:

A sailing bulk carrier for today

Square rigged ships for the present day

Improving the sailing qualities of square rigged ships

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