Into the Wind with Unbreakable Spirit

Designing a custom wind vane

Article by Paul Stovner

A young boy’s creed, “Unbreakable toys can always be used to break other toys.”

I have been sailing with a windex (or wind vane, I’ll keep using both terms) on the bow of my boat for a long time. Doug Korlann, my cohort for this article, and Roger Nelson, good sailing buddy and unwitting test subject for my riskier ideas, decided to also give it a try. Doug on his SCAMP, Barnacle, and Roger on his lug-rigged Houdini, Magic. Both liked it but immediately complained that the yards of their balanced lugs smashed their expensive wind indicators to bits when the sail is dropped.

In the past there was a wind vane mounted on a stainless-steel spring would survive a lot of abuse if knocked with a boom. For the life of me I can no longer find these for sale.

Okay, so I was now tasked to come up with an indestructible wind vane, or I was going to quickly lose my alternate-mounting-location converts. I’m also becoming aware my disciples might be clumsy. And of course, any design had to follow the Small Boat Sailors Religious Code, from page 231, section 20, sub-section 135, paragraph 10, verse 5, sentence 12— “It has to be cheap.”

Roger was the first to try my new idea and let me tie a piece of yarn to what was left of his existing windex. This would occasionally start to wrap itself around its post, but as Roger, always the optimist, said, “It still works.” Doug was soon to verify this on Barnacle, but noted his functioned best with about a 12” length as the 6” didn’t work. He also tried some other materials, but found yarn seemed to be the best as it is light.

In the meantime, Roger was still damaging or bending what was left of his windex stem with his yard.

Hmm, more design changes.

Inspiration came to me when I had a flashback to my teenage years driving through Connecticut and having to replace my car antenna after a tree branch ripped it off. To thwart the demonic anti-radio trees of CT, I was forced say some exorcistic words (it was the 70s) and installed a flexible antenna

Could I just attach a piece of yarn to the top of one of these $9.00 flexible antennas for use on the boat?

Doug was the next one to give this idea a try, but he found it still wrapped around the antenna; at least it didn’t break.

Now I needed to make the yarn swivel, but come on Doug, use one of the smooth sided antennas. Besides, they’re cheaper than the one you used which cost $10.50. Stick with the Code!

At this point if you think you are smarter than us, don’t worry about it too much, you are, as we continued to try other ideas that didn’t work so well either.

Doug and Roger are also fussy, saying I needed to add those angled whiskers thingies (directionals?). So, I added two zip ties to the antenna just below the yarn. Now because of science stuff like wind vectors, slip streams and gravity, we found the yarn would tangle instantly around the whiskers. Too bad, it was easy and cheap to make them out of zip ties and attach them to the antenna’s body. But good news, you get extra points if you figured out you can use a green tie for starboard, and a red one for port. We didn’t. A non-boater pointed it out to us.

The final working design was to modify a 6 x 66mm (or about 2.5”) hat or bouquet pin and shove it down the top of the antenna.

Shrink tube should added and cover the top (head) of the pin and about 3/8” down the shaft. Don’t use electrical tape, the whiskers will just swivel around the pin. After that a plastic bead is slid on, followed by a #9 or #10 fishing barrel swivel, and then a second plastic bead. The two whiskers are attached to the shrink tube above the first bead. Then this assembly is pushed down into the top of the antenna leaving enough room so the barrel swivel rotates freely around the mast. The string is tied onto the other end of the barrel swivel.

Caution when pushing the hat pin in as the antenna has metal coiled in it. This can cause the pin to move off center, poke out to the side, sticking you in the hand (several times in my case).

There are some choices for mounting the flexible antenna. It has a threaded hole in the bottom with a M6-1.0 thread. A M6-1.0 x 12mm bolt works best to mount the antenna to most things.

It also has the following adapters to help with mounting choices:

· M6-1.0 to M4-0.7 stud

· M6-1.0 to M5-.08 stud

· M6-1.0 to M6-1.0 This is just a stud that some believe performs a questionable procedure of turning a female into a male. Since not all folks understand sailboat hardware, it’s best not to mention using this method at social gatherings.

Pro tip: Yarn can be kinky so it helps to wet the yarn and hang it with a weight on the end until dry. Nylon air-flow tell tails can also be used instead of yarn, but they are code breakers at $25 a set!

Roger tested his newly built wind vane on Magic and proceeded to break the vane’s mounting bracket with his yard. But the wind vane survived, so he declared that the design is good!

Here are some more pricey options that aren’t indestructible but are fairly robust. Both were mounted by drilling a hole down the center of the antenna the same size as the shaft they came with and sticking the shaft in with some glue.

Since I’m trying to convert folks to lowering their wind vanes to deck level, I need to do some witnessing on having a windex on the bow. A wind indicator serves one main purpose, to let you know when you can turn up into the wind to make it around a point or adjust the main sheet if you are maintaining course in a race, but need maximum speed. Your sail will luff/backwind and let you know if you need to pull the sail in, fall off, or possibly tack to take advantage of the wind change that suddenly favors the other side of your sail. But it is hard to tell, from your sail, if the wind has changed in your favor to let you point higher. The wind indicator, on the bow, is very sensitive to the direction change, and I can see it happen before I can feel it in the sail. This gives me nice real-time effect of seeing a wind change and correcting the helm when I'm trying to round a point. It lets me take advantage of every small opportunity. My friend, Gary, just thinks my SCAMP points better than his Montgomery 15, so much so that he sold his M15 and bought a SCAMP. I feel bad I didn’t tell him I was just taking advantage of the fluky winds in our area in real time. Gary if you don’t mind, please skip reading this article.

Enjoy!

Paul Stovner; Marginal Inventor

Doug Korlann; Artist Extraordinaire

Roger Nelson; Optimistic Adventurer