First off, no liability accepted, make your own mind up!

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• Autocad 2000 file
Autocad 2004 file

The centre 2 holes line up with the caps bulkhead brackets and the lowers deck plate (55mm centres for 8mm dia. Holes), and the outer holes were added to provide a bit of extra support with 2 extra bolts through new holes drilled in the deck.

From 6mm 304 plate (couldn’t get 316 – see how we go with corrosion – easy to replace), tight radius folded, no welds or V cuts.

Fitted with 4 No. M8 x 40 316 S.S. bolts each, with 316 plain washers inside and out, and oversized 30mm dia. washers on the inside of the new outer holes. Plain nuts backed up with nyloc nuts to provide a bit of extra thread grip. Not over tightened, to reduce the effects of the clamping load reducing the working load of the bolts.

Only slight problem was the hump in the deck from the lowers, meaning the outer holes on the lowers can’t be drawn up really tight without stressing the deck with a hard spot, so I put an extra oversized washer between the chainplate and the deck to space the gap and allow tightening.

The angles of 105 & 115 were almost right. If anything the caps could have been 102.5, and the lowers 117.5, but I suspect everyone’s boat will be slightly different due to deck flex, and the angle can be easily measured. I had to ease the clevis pin holes to allow the bottle screw to fit in a straight line (not enough clearance on the clevis pin to allow the bottle screw to articulate in the line of the load).

The height of the hole is lower than the old delta bolts, so check you have enough to open up the bottlescrews to add some more shroud length.

The whole thing now looks bullet proof, and I believe more elegant than the larger versions made that cover both shrouds with one piece, and allows proper angling of the shrouds. Went nuts with the Sikaflex, so bit of a mess to clean up though...

Downsides – Shroud base is narrowed by about 20mm each side, and over time the outer edges of the chainplates may start to dig in to the deck, and the inner side lift. I’ll just keep an eye out for flex, and maybe replace the M8 bolts every couple of years. At least I can now.

The Makefast V bolts look incredibly small for the job when you take them out….. what were Westerly thinking. I’ve now got 8 bolts per side holding the rig up, instead of 4 (any one of which failing would have toppled the stick). So have a huge confidence boost in the rigs stability – was getting paranoid about the V bolts failing, having replaced all the standing rigging last year.

Took me 2.5 hours to fit all 4, on the mooring, with a hand drill, mole grips, ratchet set and rat tail file. Took the shroud loads up on a genoa halyard tied around the middle stanchion base whilst working on each one. Old nuts came off fairly easily despite being well and truly rusty.

Cost – Bolts and washers S$32 (about 10 quid – I’m lucky that stuff is dirt cheap out here). The chainplates….. A lunch for a favoured contractor of mine (who also made me new teak rubbing strakes for the same price).

Hope this might be useful. Will send some pics of the finishes article when back from Christmas in Australia buying more bits for Slingshot...

Cheers,

Keith in Singapore

Update from Keith 07jan2008