Cash. Thank for this information. This is certainly a possibility. One mitigating factor in my case is I routinely remove my halyards when I do not plan to use the boat for more than one or two weeks me. I store the boat with my leader lines rigged. This does give me an opportunity to test the run of the halyard through the mast. I have not noticed any binding.
However, your post reminds me that I used large zip ties around my cable bundle to hold the bundle away from the interior walls of the mast and prevent banging. Those ties could be abrading the halyards.
If this is the culprit I will have to suffer until I get the mast down again. Not something which will happen soon unless I have a dire emergency..
Yes, that is why I asked. Halyards are not cheap. My thought was if the core is not compromised the line should be OK. I would not go offshore with it nor would I climb using it.
I have a special arborist rope i reeve for climbing. This line is stored safely in my closet where it lives cool, comfortably and out of the sun.
Hi Geoff, you have it backwards on Sta-set. the cover provides almost all the strength. I had a Sta-set reefing line on my 45 and coming back from bermuda it failed as soon as the cover failed, due to chafe. fortunately the line was long enough for me to cut off the bad part and re-run.
With dyneema/hmpe/uhmpe cored ropes, you are correct that the cover is mostly for chafe/UV and as long as the core is intact then the rope wonât fail catastrophically.
Lance, your statement makes absolutely no sense. The cover thickness doesnât vary between line diameters. The core does, and thatâs what changes the load rating.
Geoff,
of course you are correct that core size helps determine strength and I misspoke about the cover providing the strength. What I should have said is that sta-set is a âcover-dependentâ line - both the core and the cover must remain intact to maintain the line strength. If you damage the cover on sta-set, it will fail catastrophically, both core and cover will part. I know this from personal experience when chafe broke the cover on my 2nd reef line which was sta-set. as soon as the cover parted, the whole line did.
In contrast, lines with a vectran/dyneema core are core-dependent for their strength, and the cover is essentially only important for chafe/uv protection (although dyneema is remarkably uv resistant even when uncovered). If you chafe through the cover of a core-dependent line, the core will continue to provide the line strength of the line and you are unlikely to have a catastrophic failure. The tack line on my race boat was Viper. The cover chafed through and the line slipped in the clutch because the core was pulling through the detached cover, but the line didnât break. If it had been sta-set, sta-setx, or any other cover-dependent line, the tack of my spinnaker would have been sky-high.
I suspect that you 2nd reef failure was due to whatever chaffed the exterior cover continued to chafe interior core, and caused the failure. I regularly had chafe on my jib halyard, which got placed under huge stresses in storms, that never failed.
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