O day 222 anniversary rigging tension guide

Jul 5, 2019
5
O’ Day 222 Little Egg Harbor NJ
Ahoy all,
I am new to the sailing world and would like to know if anyone has a rigging tension guid Or a resource where I can get one
 
May 24, 2004
7,129
CC 30 South Florida
have not heard of a guide "per se". Identify your wires by size and number of strands and look up the breaking strength for it. Tighten them to 20 to 25% percent of the breaking strength using a Loos Gauge. Determine whether your boat has a "mast rig" or "fractional Rig", Keep the mast straight by gradually, and alternating tightening and the shrouds on both sides. On a fractional rig you must determine the amount of bend for the mast. Check the Forum Archives as there should be some postings on how to tune the rig.
 
Oct 19, 2017
7,733
O'Day 19 Littleton, NH
Might I recommend, for your boat, an easy tuning technique that does not require a guide or a guage.
The 222 is a fractional rig with a simple upper and lower set of shrouds and a backstay. I find this setup to be very straight forward and visual tuning should be as accurate, even more so, than guage tuning.
Set your boat level or in the water to be sure of level. Keep in mind that waterline trim on a small boat like yours will be significantly affected as a person moves around, while on the water. There are visual ways to overcome the problems if you can't get the boat level.
First, determine your rake. This is somewhat a matter of preference, helm balance and sail cut. The boom should be approximately horizontal. I like a decent amount of rake and for a 22' fractional sloop, five inches of rake at the gooseneck seems good. Adjust for performance later.
Measure the rake by hanging a weight on your main halyard and let the mast back on its forestay until the halyard hangs 5" aft of the sail track at the gooseneck.
Your rig should be loose and little tension at all should be on your stays. Just enough to keep the mast up and approximately centered left to right.
Next, set the backstay tension. You do this by tightening the backstay against the established length of the forestay. Watch the mast as you start to feel it get tight. Look for the moment the mast just starts to bend. When you see the mast bending against the fractional forestay, back it off until the mast just straightens out. Sight up the mast to be sure it is straight. This point is the ideal tension. It doesn't matter what the stay tension measures. Less tension is too loose, more tension bends the mast.
If you have older sails, you might want to put a little pre-bend in. This should be determined by sailing performance trials. There are no set tensions for this.
Mark your turnbuckles so you know where to set them when repeating the setup again.
Now tighten your uppers so they hold the mast plumb with the halyard hanging just above the gooseneck. They should feel taught and not allow the top of the mast to sway. You can check for centered plumb by stretching the halyard to the port turnbuckle, make the tail fast, then make sure it comes to the same spot at the starboard turnbuckle. Set the tension as loose as possible while still holding the mast head fast. Sight up the mast to make sure the is no bend laterally.
Now tighten the lowers so the shrouds just begin to feel tight, keeping any bend out of the middle. You can check this by pulling the halyard tight at the gooseneck and sighting up the mast to be sure it stays inline with the tensioned halyard.
At this point, you have essentially "dock tuned" your rig. Re-check the tension on the uppers, then take her out for a sail.
Look for sagging turnbuckles on your leeward shrouds while sailing in a good stiff breeze on a beam reach. In 15 - 20 knots of wind, you should tighten up the turnbuckles equally on both sides until the slack just comes out. Mark the turnbuckles so you can re-rig easily in the future.
This will give you a basic tuning. The tensions are all right where they should be, even if you don't know the actual tensions in numerical values.

Good luck and I hope this has been helpful.

-Will (Dragonfly)
 
Jul 5, 2019
5
O’ Day 222 Little Egg Harbor NJ
Thank you both so much you have made a daunting task manageable As a new sailor it is a great comfort to know I can look to folks like you for help
 
Nov 9, 2012
2,500
Oday 192 Lake Nockamixon
If you want to get into more nitty-gritty of your rig, and a variety of other rigs, you could check out Seldén Mast's rigging guide, available as "Hints and Advice" PDFs to download here: Rigging instructions & sailmakers guide : Seldén Mast AB

One thing you should be aware of is that the 222 is not designed as a performance boat, and rig tensions recommended by Seldén are, in my opinion, way too high for the boat. In fact, the original O'day rigging guide describes the rig as "hand tight" if memory serves.

As a racing influence sailor who is always trying to "sail fast," over time I have become less and less obsessive over my rig, and have allowed the rig tensions of my 192 to go far less than I normally would do. Sailing in roughly 8-10 knots, I allow the leeward upper shroud to loosen, not to the point of flailing around, but visibly looser. When I ran higher tensions, I had issues with the rig loosening over time. I have since shored up my mast step, and I am loathe to have to cut the whole thing apart and repair it, though I know this is in my future. Besides which, the boat wasn't designed to have a very tight rig anyway.

I rig my boat with about .75-1" of mast pre-bend, and I have learned not to make the lowers too tight, as they will pull the pre-bend out of the mast. I sail the boat close hauled in about 8-10 knots, and note the amount of weather helm, going for about 6º of weather helm in the tiller. I adjust this primarily using the balance between uppers and forestay, slacking off both uppers the same amount, and taking up on the forestay to reduce weather helm, or converse to increase weather helm. At first attempts to tune the rig, I had it so neutral, that in higher winds I had definite lee helm. But I don't want so much weather helm that I'm slowing the boat down with excessive pull on the tiller. I tighten my backstay so that it's not flopping around, and I've found that more backstay just seems to put a noticeable crick in the top of the mast above the hounds, and that doesn't look right to me, so I see to reduce that. I use the main halyard pulled down to chainplates to make sure that the mast is straight up and down side-to-side, and with main halyard pulled down to the base of the mast tightly, to sight up the back of the mast to estimate pre-bend. Then use lowers to make sure the mast is in column, but not pull out the pre-bend. Because I have one, I use my Loos gauge to make sure uppers kinda match tension, lowers match each other, and forestay doesn't seem excessively high tension compared to uppers.
 
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Jun 8, 2015
26
Oday 222 Tahoe
There is an original owners manaual here and on the Facebook Oday222 site which also a tuning guide for racing, but has a starting tennison section.
 
Sep 29, 2015
110
Oday 222 Lake N ockamixon, pa
A lot of good info here. On my 222, I go by the owners manual and make the upper shrouds hand tight and the lowers taught. It works out to be about 120 lbs on the Loos Gauge. The literature of the gauge suggests about 220 lbs for the size wire of the 222 rigging. It's OK if the leeward shrouds go a little slack. That's the shrouds stretching and the hull deforming under the pressure. My sense is, that 220 lbs of tension constantly on the rigging is going to distort the hull somehow. This is a small boat with thin hull material, although stronger than many boats of similar size. I can tell the shape changes because the safety lines are sometimes taught or slack depending if it's on the trailer or in the water for a period of time. I do most of my sailing on the Chesapeake in the early and late season. The winds are mostly in the upper teens and gusting into the 20's. The Vang is on hard to maintain sail shape and that's where a lot of pressure on the rig is coming from. The thing is, when you're not sailing, the Vang is off. If you purchase a Loos Gauge (Amazon), all the instructions are in there. If you're a new sailor, just go sailing to get the feel; and watch the tell-tails on the leech of the main and keep them streaming.
 
Jun 25, 2004
1,108
Corsair F24 Mk1 003 San Francisco Bay, CA
All Fiberglass hulls flex. It’s a fact of life. They flex in waves, when loaded on the trailer, etc. Flexing is totally normal. But that doesn’t mean the hull will be damaged by tuning the rig tight enough to flex the hull a little. The hulls were engineered to take it.

Virtually all Production boats were designed and built to be strong enough to carry rigging loads with the wires tensioned to at least 10% of breaking strength.

Usually the lower side shrouds are the least loaded parts of the rig that has multiple side shrouds. Upper shrouds, forstays and backstays have to carry higher loads.

For 1/8” diameter wires (as found on side shrouds often vast majority of 22 foot boats), 10% of breaking strength is around 180-190 foot pounds.

Judy B
Sailmaker
 
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Sep 29, 2015
110
Oday 222 Lake N ockamixon, pa
Thanks for the pro input! I'll stick with my 120 lbs thank you. It seems to work well for me. When I bend the mast with the back stay, all those other tensions go out of wack. When I crank down on my furling system to get the sag out, again, all those tensions go out of wack. So, I'm not sure why we need 10% of the shroud breaking strength as a measurement? It's all so interrelated, vectored and complicated. It's an equation with 4 unknowns. I give thanks for the solid keel and mast support post. It reduces the number of force variables.
 
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Oct 19, 2017
7,733
O'Day 19 Littleton, NH
I'm not sure why we need 10% of the shroud breaking strength as a measurement?
Exactly! It's the wrong measurement to concentrate on. Certainly the design engineer needs to know that number, but a mast needs a certain tension on the stays to hold it in column and to bend it based on mast height, material, cross-section, placement and sweep of spreaders, and lever arm on a fractional rig. The breaking strength of the stays will have no effect on what that tension is. It's just a convenient number to satisfy the owner who wants a "scientific" way to get it exact. When choosing what size stay to select for your boat? Get stays that can do the job within about 10-15% of their braking strength. After that is done, tune to get the job done with a minimum tension, whatever that might need to be.

-Will (Dragonfly)
 
Jun 25, 2004
1,108
Corsair F24 Mk1 003 San Francisco Bay, CA
Here’s why 10% of breaking load is an important lower limit for tension on side shrouds.:
With the boat heeled 20-30 degrees you need the side shrouds to be tight enough to keep the mast in column laterally. With less tension than 10% of breaking load ( for sure at say at 5-6%), SS wires are in their “highly elastic range” and stretch too much to keep the mast in column. The risk of buckling the mast at the spreader is increased.

Btw, the only variables are the maximum righting moment and the dimensions and geometry of the rig. There are no other “unknowns”.

You can either measure or estimate the righting moment of the boat. Righting moment is, loosely defined, the forces that the boats hull shape and keel can general to resist heeling caused by wind forces on the sails and rig.. Once the max righting moment is known, we know how much force the rig has to resist. If we know the geometry of the rig, we can calculate the loads on the wires. It’s a a straight forward Static equilibrium analysis.

Anybody who still remembers his/ her trigonometry can learn how to analyze a rig in Brion Toss’s book , _The Riggers Apprentice_. You don’t need to have taken any classes in mechanics. He teaches it all In his book on an understandable, easy way.
 
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Oct 19, 2017
7,733
O'Day 19 Littleton, NH
With less tension than 10% of breaking load ( for sure at say at 5-6%), SS wires are in their “highly elastic range” and stretch too much to keep the mast in column.
Judy, I really appreciate that piece of information. I did not know that, but I suspected such was the case.

The reason I find using the breaking strength of the stays a bit silly is because the design engineers have already calculated this and supposedly chose the correct size stay. It's breaking strength should be immaterial to the proper tension for holding up the mast on a reach, bending or pre-bending the mast or holding the mast straight under load. These things are ultimately determined by other factors regardless of the wire size. However, what really got me going on tuning was when I read a blog about upgrading s.s. stays to a newer stronger composite material and the blogger reported that his rigger was against it because to keep within the 15% braking strength specs, it would put too much tension on the chain plates, the mast, the hull, etcetera. That kind of formulaic thinking missed the point. The carbon composite material was lighter, stronger and had less stretch than the original s.s. cables. It wouldn't behave the same way and using breaking strength as a guide for setting tension is incomplete thinking. Of course you need to use breaking strength as a guide when choosing your stay material and size, but once that has been done, it does not seem like the measurement to use for tuning.

-Will (Dragonfly)
 
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