So having complete the task, here are some notes.
If you have a headfoil-2, you are on 6mm tapes. That means a 1206 tuff luff, or a size 6 foil from headfoil 2. If you have a tuff luff, you can be either 1205 or 1206. This is because the 1205 and 1206 go over 1/4 inch wire, but the size 5 headfoil-2 system does not. For added sport, most 5mm tapes will work in the headfoil-2 foil, but not in the 1206 tuff luff.
When all was said and done, we replaced just the foil in in our headfoil 2. This is pretty straighforward, but there are about three gotchas you want to look out for.
First, when headfoils ships a foil these days, it will have a cable-tie stuffed into the foil in a slightly odd way. It's holding open the "ziplock" slot where the foil eventually goes around the headstay. We pulled it out. I think you'd be happier leaving it in, sliding it down past the point where you need to cut, re-zipping shut the foil where you need to cut, and working from there.
The major tricks are that you use the cable-tie to slide open the zip-lock section. It's actually very cool, as the head of the tie slides along inside, and the tail unzips things very nicely. The second trick is that there seems to be no way to apply enough thumb pressure to reseat the ziplock. I ended up using a pair of channel locks, and a lot of patience. I'd suggest a very smooth c-clamp might work far better. (Adjusted so that it works the ziplock back in place, and can be slid along.) Channel locks, at least the pair I had, were too grooved on the surface to want to slide along the foil, so I ended up doing a gentle crimping squueze every 2 inches, the entire length of 30+ feet of headfoil. That got old.
Our measurement was just short of 32 feet. That's with four inches of spacer at the top. (Which I'm not sure was present in the original setup)
- David
