Wire Rope Halyards

My 35-3 has wire halyards. The main seems to be in good shape but the jib halyard is showing a few broken strands. The wire halyards seem like a good idea but for the fact that they are hard to replace. I would like to switch to a more standard rope halyard (Dacron?). Any gotchas and/or considerations before taking this on?

There's absolutely no reason to stay with wire- it's heavy (reducing righting moment and thus performance) and hard on hands and sheaves/blocks. Just make sure to double check your masthead sheave to make sure it doesn't have any burrs that might destroy a new rope halyard.

If you are looking for rope halyards, feel free to email or PM me- I do running rigging work and can save you some little cash if you like- but any reputable rigging shop can get you fixed right up.

Chris

The Gotcha

The Gotcha may be the size of the existing Shive in the Masthead
The halyard wire on the 35II is 3/16" and the max shive line size is 1/4".
The larger 5/16-3/8" halyard line may not work on your Shive.
It's time for a climb to verify your existing rigging :nerd:
I will have to change out Shives to make the change to line halyards.

Happy Bosons Chair

Line!

Not much to add to the excellent observations from Chris and Dan.
I can tell you from personal experience with out '88 (Kenyon spar) that when I changed over to line the masthead sheaves did need to be smoothed up from many years of scratches and abrasion from the wires.

Also, I tried 3/8 and 5/16 "T-900" and found that the former would rub on the cheeks a bit, and so went with 5/16. The later will hold in the factory clutch stoppers... and with a strength of 7000# is as strong as most wire shrouds!


Since halyards are always final-tensioned on a housetop winch, I have not found that handling the "smaller" lines is a problem.

YMMV.

Loren

Rope size

We replaced our wire-to-rope halyards with 3/8" T900 (moderately hi-tech). We also replaced the sheaves at the the same time. On our boat at least, there might have been room for 7/16" halyards, but it would have been close. I don't think we could have gotten 1/2" through the sheaves without some binding. 3/8" is just enough to grab on to for halyards. Limiting ourselves to 3/8" meant Dacron wouldn't be sufficient. If you are patient and wait for "a deal" you can usually find some hi-tech line for an affordable price on line. Our 3/8" T-900 ended up only costing us a few nickels more per foot than 1/2" StasetX.

I am likely the only dissenter on this topic here on the board. For a jib halyard, especially if you have roller furling I don't see the issue with wire/rope halyards. Most of the time it goes up and down once a year. As for the issue of handling being wire/rope, almost never do I have to even touch the wire! The only time is unclipping the main halyard and reattaching it to the head of the mainsail. Since my boat had new wire/rope setups on it when I bought her I wasn't running out to change them. When they wear I'll price the high tech stuff and the wire/rope. Whatevers cheaper will go on. Weight is the only argument that I can buy but since I don't race its not really a factor either. Just my 2cents.... RT