Sail Design - How We Do It

We have complete control.

AutoCAD, AutoCAD Inventor and Rhino training changes the way sails are designed at the loft. We find that designing sails in CAD actually takes more time than the more tradition method. The time saved in the lofting and cutting of the sails is dramatically reduced and more than offsets the extra design time.

Before moving to CAD design Kevin and John spent a long time investigating the "canned" sailmaker software programs that are commercially available. They found that none of these programs allowed them to create a sail on the computer that they already could design with traditional methods and loft on the floor. This was especially evident with tri-radial genoas and mainsails.

Kevin and John had discovered years earlier that joining sail panels together using catenary curves greatly improved the aging and as a result improved the shape of their sails. The other flaw with these "canned" programs is that a sail designer cannot specify the actually curve that is used to shape the sail. Using the canned programs a designer has only limited control over the sail shape and while in many cases these sails may be "good enough" they never will design great sails.

Using AutoCAD Farrar Sails is able to design sails without any software limitation. This freedom of design enables the design to fully utilize the sail material performance characteristics. Modest cloth waste reductions have been made by the ability to nest the sail panels on the cutting machine which is helping to hold down sail costs.