MAKING SAILS

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Sails are part of the model and they deserve the very same attention the rest of the model was given. Most models are so small a scale that any stitching only looks ridiculous. Real sail stitching runs about 1/2 an inch per stitch, but on models, even the finest sail stitching runs around 24 scale inches per stitch, or more! Real stitching was done, usually, with flax cord which is a light brown or dark tan color, meant to do the job, not color coordinate with the sail cloth. It's only with modern synthetics that colored sail thread came around, and even that is more often than not, white. The thread is doubled in hand sewing, but even then, on models in the most common 1:76-1:96 scale range - you'd be hard pressed to see any stitching that was scale sized. What you see are the seams which are a "French Hem" of 4 thicknesses of cloth. The best way to represent that is to glue together overlapping panels of cloth, but in the smaller scales even that is too much as the cloth is already so out-of-scale thick, not to mention how difficult making a model's sails that way would be.

Modelers, apparently, are mostly men, and seem to have issues when it involves needles and thread. They want to get sail making over with as fast as possible or avoid it entirely, before someone catches them doing "woman's work." There are whole chapters in books and forums denouncing the value of sails on static models as detracting from their display. Those arguments are pointless when dealing with working models that actually require those sails to operate. Well, gent's, the clothes make the man, and if you want to dress all your hard work and attention to detail of your "scale" model in a clown suit, that's your prerogative.

What I'm going to talk about here aren't high tech racing yacht sails made of exotic alien technologies and algorithms, but are rather simple, functional, durable, working sails for your scale model that look good whether your model is or isn't sailing, and are easily made by anyone capable of building a model to begin with.

Materials
When I started my Constellation I initially intended to use a light muslin for her sails. At 1:36 scale my muslin wasn't bad for texture and weight, and I had about 10 yards of 60" wide stuff on hand already from an old project. I actually made a main tops'l from it which was really a bear to get done. No matter what I did, everything unraveled, puckered, and just frustrated me to no end.

Then a modeler on RCGroups.com, Dan, pointed me toward the cloth used in the SC&H kit he had just built; DuPont Supplex. Supplex is used in outdoor wear; windbreakers, rain gear, etc. It's light, strong, water resistant, colorfast, and comes in various colors and weights, and generally it doesn't have that shininess most synthetic cloth has. Being a synthetic gives it another feature over cotton and muslin - it melts. No, that's a good thing! Because it melts, it can be cut with a hot knife which seals the edges against fraying, and make holes for reef points with a soldering iron that are instantly sealed grommets. With the muslin I guessed I might get 3-5 years of use out of them before UV and salt water made them unusable. I've had to restore models with sails made of various materials, including muslin, that in very short times sitting in-doors on a shelf were all brown, brittle, turning to dust, or molding away. Dan's Syren has been sailing for over 5 years now with no sign of deterioration.

What ever material you use, lay out the patterns for your sails so that the panels of the real sail run the same as the grain in your cloth. The grain runs the length of the cloth and across it. Diagonally is "on the bias." On jibs, stays'ls, and gaff headed sails, this will usually aline the leech with the cloth, while on square sails it will be perpendicular to the head of the sail. Miter cut sails (with that diagonal seam you see on modern jibs) are best cut like ordinary jibs.

Seams
Instead of stitching the panel seams, I rule them with a .03 permanent marker, one line on one side of the cloth, the other on the other side of the cloth, but offset slightly to denote the overlap of the seam. Just a quick run of the pen leaves what appears as a grayish line as opposed to a bold black line, and implies the shadow of the seam. Some modeler's might run a very fine bead of fabric glue, or something else to make the seam line less stretchy than the rest of the sail, and accentuate the seams when the sail's full of wind. This can be a tricky process, and can very easily turn out quite poorly if you try to rush it. More commonly, modeler's run a line of stitching to represent sail seams, but even at 1:24 scale, that is over-sized and clumsy looking, further, they add isult to injury buy using a highly contrasting thread color, like black, turning all that hard work into so much motel art. It also adds a lot of puckering to the sails along the stitch lines because the stitching tends to gather the cloth a bit as you sew it. It takes a lot of skill along with trial and error with your sewing machine's tension settings to keep this from happening. In my opinion, it's a great deal of work to get something that detracts rather than enhances all the work you put into the rest of the model.

Top cloths, reef bands, corner patches, etc are cut from the same cloth and glued onto the sail with washable (ie: waterproof) fabric glue. The sail is normally cut a little over-sized and this extra is folded over and glued making a hem all around the sail - after the above cloths are added. A clothes iron helps keep folds flat, and actually helps set some fabric glues.

Bolt-Ropes
Traditional sailing craft have bolt-ropes around the edges of their sails. Modern sails often hide the bolt rope inside edge taping, and don't usually have bolt-ropes along certain edges, like the leech. Bolt ropes are sewn, by hand, not to edge of the sail, but to one side of it, inside of the edge. The model bolt rope should be attached the same way. On square sails it is attached to the forward face of the sail. On for-and-aft sails it's usually attached to the right side of the sail, but it doesn't really matter. The stitching goes between two strands of the boltrope, through the third strand, and through the sail. It goes around the edge of the sail and the boltrope between every strand and is pulled tight burying the thread between the strands of the bolt-rope, in a continuous whip stitch. Each stitch advances down the bolt rope following the lay of the line. This burying of the stitching in the boltrope prevents chafing and wear weakening the stitching. It's very tempting to try to machine stitch bolt ropes on, but the bolt rope isn't held in place by a zig-zag stitch around it by anything more than friction, so it can slip; and pull through the stitching. Investing the effort in hand-sewing on your boltropes and skipping the fake seam stitching will get you good-looking and functional sails worthy of the effort you put into the rest of your model.

It's important that the sail is held out taught along the edge you're working on, but not stretched. I hold the sail in a clamp-on vice at one end, and attach some weight to a line attached to the other end of the hem I'm working on, usually with a safety-pin, not a lot of weight, just enough to keep the sail taught, maybe a 1/4 pound. This hangs off the end of the workbench. The bolt rope is held with the sail in the vice, and run along the hem you're working on and I pass it through the safety-pin with a couple of clothes pins or a pair of scissors for weight. You don't want to stretch the line either.

A bead of fabric glue is run along the sail edge for about 4 or 5 inches. This is usually about how far I can sew before the glue dries, accounting for eyes, cringles, reinforcing stitching, etc. The bolt-rope lays in the bead of glue as you sew it to the sail. The glue backs up the stitching and allows for fewer stitches. Sewing can now commence. Always use polyester thread. On a static model you can used mixed materials like cotton-clad, but a working sail will rot out cotton thread in an amazingly short time. A tan color is best as it looks like the flax sail thread usually used for this job. For more modern sails, use white or light gray. If you're working on a larger scale model, like 1:25, pull off 2 or 3 feet of thread and thread half of it through your needle - you'll use a double thickness. On smaller scales like 1:76, it's probably better to use a single strand of thread so it doesn't look like they used a rope to sew their sails. The boltrope itself, at this scale, could be three strands of the same thread walked into a rope.

It's not necessary to stitch through every strand of the bolt-rope, every third or fourth strand will do with the fabric glue to back things up. The stitching must go with the lay of the bolt-rope which will cause it to bury itself in the bolt-rope's strands.

Eyes, Cringles, and other loops
Eyes are made in the bolt-rope by taking a turn around a small rod, like a round tooth pick or another needle depending on the size of the eye. This keeps them from closing up as you sew, as well as keeping them a uniform size. The real ones are normally spliced into the boltrope and might have a metal ring stitched in where items like hooks or shackles might be attached.

Like a real boltrope, a reinforcing whipping now and then is a good idea, especially at stress points. Real sails have this so if the stitching fails, the boltrope should only pull loose as far as the whipping, or so you hope. This is typically done every 3 to 6 feet; on my Constellation at 1:36 scale that works out to every 2 inches. Inside eyes and cringles, to either side of an eye, at grommets, such as where mast hoops will attach, or the grommets for the lacing that holds the sail to a gaff or boom; anywhere the bolt rope is tugged from the sail, are good places for reinforcing whippings.

See the various points pictured below. At places such as corners where things will attach; clew, head, tack, etc; real sails will often have grommets place to either side for more reinforcing whippings, and to spread the load - see the photos below.

The simplest way to do this is as you're sewing the boltrope on. When you get to where a reinforcing stitching goes in, just take a few tight turns through the sailcloth and around the boltrope 2-5 turns should do fine depending on scale. These are also good places to stop and re-thread your needle if need be, for instance if the thread broke - it happens.

There's not many vendors that sell Supplex fabric, local fabric shops usually haven't a clue what you're asking for, and the vendors that do carry it seldom have the colors we'd want, or even white sometimes. Here are some of suppliers I'm aware of:

Rockywoods | Quest Outfitters | Fabricline | Funkifabrics (UK)

If you know of any others, especially in Europe, the UK, and Austrailia, I will gladly list them here.