Vic,
Are the two set of photos you posted in #8414 (close to the tack ?) and #8418 (upper leech?) really from the same sail?

roger, roger ... but it definitely isn't dacron? and do they have a taffetta fabric?

I will try to confirm what I got later today ... but taffetta was a key word when I ordered that sail. I actually had to go out of my way to learn how to spell it. I thought they made gals dresses out of it back when.

OK CORRECTIONs HERE...
Correction1. ..The sail is a 600S one side taffetta and one side mylar...
It appears that we have to be an engineer in regard to 3DL as the customer, combined with the sail rep, has a half dozen choices to stray away from the "listed" sails like a Marathon. Apparently, I was looking for an lighter weight sail than the Marathon so I went along with just one side taffeta ... the side that is going is the Mylar film side.

Correction 2 ... the sail cover is not Sunbrella but dacron. The
problem remains that as the 3DL shrinks, the dacron stretches.

Correction 3 ... North measures sail life in hours not years ... but then defining hours is related to wind strength and what kind of tacking is done

There is no dacron in the Marathon 3DL unless you stitch on a dacron UV cover.

my basic conclusions remain intact.
1. don't reef a 3DL on a furling
2. don't use a dacron or sunbrella stitched on uv cover.

Humbly submitted
vic

Footloose --- roger roger on the photos from same sail...
I have a dacron UV suncover ... which rightly so ... adds +3 to my PHRF here in SWFL. We get a LOT of sun here and just perhaps North may have overkilled it a bit with the weight of that dacron suncover. As originally delivered and even to 1 year later ... air seems to creep in through the dacron and form a bubble. Now as the 3dl sail shrinks a bit and the dacron stretches a bit this continues with various results in various wind conditions.

I was just browsing the North Sails site and ran across this page. Maybe it was there before, but it's the first time I've stumbled across something that shows the various 3DL offerings in one place.

Just an update photo on the sail that we raced with for the "final" time last weekend [4/12/2010]... next step is the dumpster.

two year old 3dl. Down here in Naples we are going to replace it with "anything" else.

When these sails start to delaminate they go pretty fast. I did not realize how fast or I would have had a replacement ready for it. The ONLY thing that held it together was the dacron UV cover.

NOW GET THIS ... we sailed just about the same as we did 6 months ago against our competition ... BUT it was crew work that made the difference.



they look so good when they are new.

Vic - what do you estimate as "sailing days" that the 3DL was used? That's a real museum piece now....

~14 months x 4 weeks = 56 weeks X 2.5 days per week.
{~ 3 hours a trip}

I got 140 days {or as some like to use its life expectancy -- about 420 hours} out of two years. probably 1/2 of those days would have been somewhere over 15mph days, perhaps reefed in a bit. But the mylar has separated almost entirely on one side and the threads also appear to have separated from the base other side mostly near the leech ... probably from tacks, and near the luff probably from furling. I am sure a 163 would have not lasted as long on the leech end as the center threads there are showing abrasive fraying.

which I suppose is pretty good for a 3 day life sail.

At the risk of taking this topic one more notch ... So anyway I was prepping this 2 year old 3DL sail for the dumpster this morning and I looked at the sausage bag ... which by the way was four feet longer than it needed to be with the sail straight out ... and I said to myself what do I do with this nearly brand new oversize bag? And this label pops out at me telling me the sail is a 500 medium ... now I may have this sail weight thing completely wrong, but I was sort of under the impression that the 500 sails were really light wind sails. And since my salesman did recently tell me it was a 600 sail in his records ... and since all the other sails I have in bags from North seem to be marked pretty accurately ... I now am wondering if indeed I blew apart a light weigh sail thinking it was a "medium"

What do you guys think?

Vic - I would call North Sails and ask them to bring up the order number listed in the system. They have an online order system that should have the build specs on your order number. Tell them you are considering purchasing another sail and ask if they can provide the exact details on what you bought before.