Today Greg and I spent the day giving our much neglected Super Taipan some love.
Some of you will have seen the boat before and a lot of people around the world know of it, but for those that don't: We took a set of Taipan 5.7 hulls and mutated them into a 10ft wide carbon masted weapon.
We have some really trick parts on the such as Marstrom M20 rudders and carbon rudder gudgeons that Greg made one winter...
Aside from the usual jobs like replacing ropes and blocks, we went a little radical.... I hate wires so we replaced the sidestays and forestay with rope! There have been some big developments in rope technology over the past couple of years and now its feasible to use rope in the same diameter in place of wire.
DSK78 is same for same with wire in terms of strength and creep so we made up a set as you can see in the pics above. We weighed the original rigging and it came in at dead on 2kg, the new stuff??? well as you can see in the photo its just over 200grams and thats complete with lashing for the bottom and all fittings! So a 10:1 ratio for weight saving is a big deal particularly when you consider it's up the rig too.
We test it on Sunday so maybe I have an funny story to tell come Monday...
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