2009 Hospice Regattas National Championship Sails to be built by Haarstick Sailmakers - Rochester NY

Haarstick Sailmakers has been selected to build 12 suits of Sonar sails for the Hospice Regattas National Championships in Rochester! We are all very excited and pleased to have been selected for this honor, and are ready to produce these sails in time for the June 5th opener.

We will be utilizing our proven Design/CAD/Gerber cutter system that we pioneered in 1974, when we invented the process of computer driven sail cutting, and set up the Gerber cutter in Annapolis, MD. Over the next ten years, we cut over 200,000 Laser sails with our Gerber Cutter. In 1985 we brought the Gerber cutter to Rochester, and began development of our own CAD system. We wanted a system that could define the panels in any sail so accurately, that after cutting the panels, we would be able to assemble these panels into the final sail without fairing the seam curves, or the outside edges, even on our spinnakers. This, we believe, is still unique to our system, and allows us to build sails to the highest possible degree of accuracy.

Cutting every panel faired to within a 0.008” tolerance is only part of the solution to truly identical sails. The sail cloth must also be identical. While there are always some tolerances in testing, no one tests cloth more thoroughly than we do, or is more selective. We have tested various lots of cloth for these sails, and have selected the best of Dacron fabrics for the main and jibs, as well as the Nylon for the spinnakers. Each group of sails: the mains, the jibs, and the spinnakers will be cut from the same lot/batch number to insure cloth consistency throughout all the sails.

We have tested the Dacron cloth samples, just as we always do: four strips are pulled on our Instron machine, and graphs of the stretch versus load are recorded. We then put 4 strips that are cut next to the 1st set and subject them to our unique Impact Flutter test program, and once again pull these “beaten” strips, and produce a second set of graphs. The data from these tests are loaded into our data base which compares these test results to all the prior samples of the same type of cloth, and tells us if the samples are within our tolerances for acceptance, and we then pick the best of the pieces tested for each of the sails.

This may seem to be excessive, but if you really want to build sails to the closest tolerances possible, the design, the cutting, and the cloth must all be the best! We are very proud of the technology that we have developed over the years, that we believe gives us an edge in the quality and accuracy of our One Design sails.

For the next three years the Hospice Regattas National Championship will be hosted by the Rochester Yacht Club and they will be using the Haarstick Sails that we are building as I write this. Many thanks to Rochester Yacht Club, Lifetime Care and the Hospice Regattas National Championship Organizing Authority for choosing Haarstick to build these sails. We are excited to see the sails out on the water.

Steve Haarstick, President
Haarstick Sailmakers, Rochester, NY