I bought a used nacra f18. The outhaul has been virtually frozen since I got the boat more than 6 months ago. I recently drilled out the rivets and removed the boom endcaps to refurbish whatever I found amiss.

The design of the part of the outhaul mechanism attached to the boom end-cap clevis pin is really crappy. It's like something somebody slapped together with little or no thought. It's certainly not what I consider "engineered".

After rebuilding this mechanism with new nylon bushings and liberally applying lithium grease, there was still a huge amount of friction in this part of the mechanism. So much that even with huge tension on the bungee which retracts the outhaul, you had to manually feed the outhaul sheet into the boom, to get it to retract.

I replace this mechanism with a 3-pully harken block, but in order to use this, I left off the boom end-cap.

If anybody else is wrestling with this, and wants to see what I did, let me know and I'll try to upload some pics.

On my N20, the outhaul system in the boom broke. After unsuccessfull efforts to remove the end cap, I gave up and built a new outhaul that runs on the outside of the boom. It works perfectly!

Just punch the middle of the foot of the sail!

Many f18 sailors tie the outhaul off anyway.

http://www.catsailor.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=166277&page=1

That older boom is on the heavy side. Especially with all the hardware inside for the outhaul. Maybe you could just replace the boom with an Infusion boom and use the knot in the slot method for outhaul.