The Sail Preservation Society……….

Kit nowadays ain’t cheap, so we need to do what we can to keep our sails, masts, and extensions in good condition. This could be for some people simply washing down with cold water or it could mean washing it with soap, drying it off and storing in a warm place. Whatever your routine, the fact is that you need to have one as the materials used in modern Severne sails need to cleaned in a certain way. That’s not  to say they are weak or fragile – We have found over years of pre cleaning our used sails we get in stock, that Severne materials are much more resilient than other makes, and come up fantastically when steam cleaned.

So what can we do to preserve our precious sails etc. Well, firstly it’s what you clean it with. We use TFR, a specially formulated wash including a mild caustic soda which is excellent for our use. We start selling our sail wash in 1 ltr containers from in the next 2 weeks at £9.95 . We wash the sail down with a brush after mounting it onto an old used mast we had lying around. Once we brushed it with the TFR we then steam clean it with a pressure washer – Now before I get a hail of ” You’ll damage the sail.”….. and “You’ll melt the monofilm” – take care to keep the lance moving at all times and YOU WON’T!! We use our steam cleaner on 80 degrees and it doesn’t hurt the sails at all. This we generally do twice a year but between times a standard garden hose is fine.

I also always use HOT water to hose down my kit. It dissolves the salt making sand penetration less likely. The TFR will also really bring your boom grio and lines up well too. It will take all of the minute dust which discolours sail fabric out bringing it back to a vibrant original colour – our TFR has a small amount of caustic soda in it which brings up whites really well.

Once you done that then you can air dry your sail – we use an old Grenade extension which has been concreted into my lawn to enable the mast to stand vertically with the sail slipped over it. It drys in minutes and is very easy to use.

I then ALWAYS check my deckplate tendon and lube up my pulleys. So many sailors don’t even know about the lube you can buy (from us) for lubricating your pulleys safely – use grease and sand gets pulled in. Use oil and again sand can stick to it and jam pulleys. Use WD40, a common ‘Go to’ lube and its components will not only melt the new Severne pulleys, they also eat into the fabric and shorten its life considerably.

The deckplate tendon is £15 to replace and is likely to need changing every 2 years or so – Team Rider Andy Holland is known to go through deckplate tendons in less than 1 year so be warned – check them regularly!!

Categorised in: Blog

This post was written by Neil Greentree (Team Rider)