The chinese junk rig is very cool, and has a lot of advantages- I am thinking I might try making one for sailing a dinghy.
It's really easy to reef in strong winds, it is very strong because stress is spread out evenly over the sail rather than concentrated in the corners, and it achieves good aerodynamic lift with a totally flat sail, unlike regular triangle sails on Bermudan rigged boats which need a complex curvature which makes the sails expensive and difficult to build. Tyler > They were a sea-faring regional power before Confucius (? I think, was a > great article in National Geographic and also in a Navy magazine I used > to subscribe to, point is that they did this hundreds of years before > the English/Spanish/French/Dutch), trading all over Asia and Africa, and > there is evidence that they even sailed to North America. They invented > the concept of compartmenting a ship, all though they did it for trade > reasons instead of engineering and then later discovered the benefit > (harder to sink a ship with water tight compartments). Their sail > rigging also allowed their ships to sail faster and closer to the wind > than a European square-rigged ship of the same hull size. > > Max _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
