Real Quick; what are the biggest benifits to doing this?

I can see there is less exposed line to foul up. But it looks like a pain to sheeve. So what are the gains to be had with this system.
Thanks

Pros: 9:1 purchase, easy running, cheap, light, low windage, with large diameter hand-held line and no high-maintenance taper.

Cons: possible fouling inside the boom, and limited range of sheeting (~2 foot range of motion).

The system is a good fit for wide-beam buoy racing boats, like the Tornado. Narrower boats probably don't need the high purchase, and would be better served by a conventional non-cascaded system and a smaller diameter boom.

additional con: Harder to spot wear and tear on the lines.

For a "narrow" like an F16 set up for singlehanded buoyo racing, I would think this to be a good system. Easy sheeting and cheap.

Thanks for the pics Glenn. Hope you have the opportunity to test the system out live soon!

I finally tested the $100 9:1 on Monday. It is awesome. Smooth as silk, and eases more easily than anything else I've used. Pictures in a couple weeks, after more extensive testing. The sheeting range is more than adequate for racing, and seems adequate for all my sailing.

Unanticipated details:

The boom-end sheeting means a more sheeting angle than anticipated, which reduces the leach-tensioning advantage. An 8:1 mounted more forward would have less boom compression and comparable leach tensioning advantage. The forward angle means I need to remove some more material to keep the sheet from rubbing on the boom, and that I would have mounted the internal blocks at different angles to better align with the peak (close hauled) loads if I knew this at the time.

Another thing I noticed is how easing the traveler on a reach reduces luff tension by changing the forward sheeting angle, so one does not want the system to bottom-out at max-close-hauled sheeting, as one might need to sheet in more to keep the sail flat when the traveler is eased to depower upwind.

Unlike the photos, I now have a very clean pigtail system, using wide-eyed adjustable eye splices in vectran; and I added a simple outhaul, which will be upgraded later with race-style under-boom cleating.

I'm not very concerned about hidden wear, since the 1/2" mainsheet and 1/4" vectran secondary are each more than 10 times stronger than the loads require.

Great news Glenn! Really looking forward to see the pictures and hear your experiences!

About chafe.. Even if the lines are very strong and thick, any chafe will over time lead to a loss of your mainsheet if you dont watch the chafe. I would inspect it from time to time. Sitting there without a mainsheet is not much fun. Sailing back to the club with a 1:1 or 2:1 mainsheet is not much fun either. Everybody who have done so knows that for sure

Inspecting for chafe is no problem, thanks to the little "windows" where I removed hardware from my recycled boom. :-D It also helps that I used stopper knots outside the boom to secure the fixed ends of the primary and secondary sheets, so I can easily pull out those ends for inspection. I can inspect every inch of line without disassembly.

I don't think this system will work well. I have tried a similar setup. The problem is that you will not get enough travel on the mainsheet.

The travel for the block that floats in the boom is no more than the length of the boom. If we say that is 8' the 4:1 primary will only travel 2'.

I had a problem with this when I setup my cascade system. My solution was to cascade 3:1 into another 3:1 giving 9:1. On your system you would get 10:1 because of the non-cascaded line from the traveler to the boom.

You will also find that 3:1 primary does not have the missalignment problems that macca pointed out.

Hi Glenn,

it´s a while since the thread has been active. The linked pictures do not exist anymore, could you post a schematic of the System again or mail it to me, thx a lot,

Dom