J/30 Class Association Forums J/30 Forum Racing Tools and Techniques Mains with slugs ,Close the feed slot?

I just added slugs to my main, Now the slugs get caught at the feed slot. I made a pair of flat covers to close it but the slugs still catch and bind as they pass requiring handling at every slug. How have you guys solved this?
Thanks, PICS Please.

I am about to contend with the same thing, I have added slugs to my cruising dacron. As far as I can tell there are two options and I will be trying the easiest and cheapest first. Get a sail track stop bolt from ebay, they cost about 10 bucks. Raise the sail with all slugs above the feeding groove and then insert the bolt and tighten it down. The con to this method is that, with the mainsail struck and flaked, the slugs are going to all be above the feeding groove fairly high on the mast... which might look a little silly and potentially not fit beneath my sail cover... but... cheap, easy, foolproof.

The more substantive option is the track gate which I've looked into. Seems like you have done a DIY version of the gate option. The inside of the gate has to be flush with the inside of the track (think one smooth surface) and the groove width exactly even in order to keep the slugs from binding. This might entail adding some thickness to the inside of the gate to get those tolerances really really close... do a search on the forum, I know I've read a post about it on here somewhere...

Good Luck

Hi Don,

So the cheap fix doesn't work, the slot is high up that, standing on the cabin, I can barely reach to the top of the slugs to put the halyard buckle into the main clue. I ordered the slot conversion from sail rite today.

Don't forget the super inexpensive fix. Once hoisted, tie a sailtie above the slot. When the main drops, it all sits above the sailtie.

I tried several iterations of gates, and in the end liked this one the best.

For a nice sail, I'd roll it up anyway.

Rhapsody just has two stainless steel bars that are bolted in line with the track opening. The edge by the opening is ground with a bevel to allow the slugs to pass over the transition from the track to the steel slides. This works fine with the slugs on the everyday main we used. The race main is on a bolt rope and the steel bars are taken off when that main is used.

I'll be helping Kimberly load the truck for shipping Rhapsody to Oswego next week and will try and get some pictures then.

I'm looking at going to a Tides track on mine, but while I was following the R2AK (Race to Alaska...cool event) I found one of the boats was sponsored by http://www.mastgates.com/ . I haven't checked 'em out, yet, but folks up in the Port Townsend area seem to think they work. I'll probably try some on my Merit-25.

The gates from rig rite are simple and have worked flawlessly since I've switched the dacron main to slugs. At $125 - ish they're a tad pricy for what they are but the engineering seems to be spot on.

-josh

I recognize the rig rite gates as what I have on my boat as well. They came with the boat from the previous owner. They work very well.

I'm thinking about giving these guys a shot. They're less expensive than Rig-Rite, but they may be a little lightweight for the J...looks like they're primarily for smaller boats. I'm inclined to help 'em simply because they helped sponsor a boat for the R2AK...which was just TOO much fun to follow!

Just following up on this post, what were the best solutions found so far? I like thought process of the mast gates as it would allow to remove the sail without having to unscrew the gates from the mast first.