April 1 2025 - A happy accident leads to a new product with inspiration from the late George Foreman

After sailing my DF one wet weekend, I put my DF sails on one of the AGA tops at home overnight.  The tops are a slightly domed shape and are quite warm which I thought would be ideal for drying the sail.  Imagine my surprise in the morning, when I retrieved the sail and found it had taken the dome shape of the aga.  Of course the sail was ruined but it got me thinking if I could make my own moulded sails.

As it happens my neighbour runs a Carbon fibre mould business making parts for Mercedes and other F1 teams and had his own CNC equipment.  After a long conversation over a few glasses of wine, he was keen to try an experiment.  By working with one of the airflow experts that he knew in Mercedes who was involved with the Americas Cup team, we quickly prepared some sail shapes for a B rig main and jib.   As luck would have it, there were some redundant aluminium blocks from an old order for carbon fibre moulds that we could use to make a mould with.  Because they are used to the precise requirement of F1 for carbon moulding they were able to accurately produce the required plates for the sail mould. 

We took the principle of a George foreman grill to provide heat through the block and press the film to develop the shape and with an abundance of film it did not take long to find the right temperature to mould the sails, starting low and increasing the temperature.  The mould has a built-in luff curve and with a slight edge around the perimeter which marks the edge of the sail and makes life easy to cut ready for finishing.  Initial trials have gone well and we are looking to produce an A rig shortly.  Looking forward to possible production, we estimate that we could mould 10 sails a day.

I will let you all know how the A rig goes once we have the moulds made.

The George Foreman Grill