Technology Persistence required...
There is a modern fibre that is less than easy to use but if you can eventually pull it off the results can be spectacular
‘You wouldn’t use anything other than Dyneema for your halyards or sheets,’ says Banks Sails’ boss Paolo Semeraro. ‘So why accept anything less in your sails?’ There are good reasons why most sailmakers don’t offer sails reinforced with Dyneema despite its well-known strength, durability and toughness. Instead, they tend to use sailcloth made with carbon or aramid fibre. Dyneema may be stronger than carbon, much less brittle and three times lighter for the same diameter, but it’s slippery, which makes it awkward to laminate into the body of a sail – and you really don’t want a sail with load-bearing filaments that are liable to slip around when it flogs. ‘Nobody else is using it,’ Semeraro says. ‘But we have found a way to make it work.’
After five years making Dyneema- reinforced sails with no problems, there is no longer any doubt that they have indeed cracked it.
Banks Sails is also very unusual in keeping a film inside its membrane sails while almost all other sail lofts and sailcloth manufacturers have abandoned that method and moved on to filmless membranes following an embarrassing spate of problems, including some high-profile incidents in which state-of-the-art sails suffered sudden, disastrous delamination failures during major races and regattas, sometimes after very little use. ‘I must be honest and admit that we too had our share of
68 SEAHORSE
those problems,’ Semeraro says. ‘But that was more than 10 years ago, during the very early years of membrane sail manufacturing and we suffered very very few anyway. We began using our unique in-house manufacturing process – which is now called Revolution/iRevolution – seven years ago and ever since then, we haven’t had a single delamination problem with any of our sails.’ As a rule of thumb, the bigger the sail, the greater the risk of it delaminating – but this is not true with Banks’ technology due to a multilayer and multistep lamination process. Some of the sails produced by Banks Sails are enormous. ‘The largest yacht with our Revolution sails is a 133-footer with a 400m2 mainsail and a 450m2
yankee,’
Semeraro says, ‘Five years on, she’s still happily cruising in the strong breezes of the south Aegean Sea. We’ve also had fantastic results with Dyneema in Code 0 and A0 sails. The largest of those that we've made so far is the 750m2
code sail on Nomad
IV, a 100ft fast cruiser designed by Finot-Conq.’And we are very confident in making cableless flying sails, mixing Dyneema and carbon in the luff and Dyneema only in the body. Solaris 64’ and GS 80’ plus a number of other boats have these as cruising mate and racing engines. It might sound like heresy and if you’re one of the many sailors who have witnessed a laminated sail
Above:
Banks Sails Europe have developed a unique multi layer, multi step sailcloth lamination process that enables them to put layers of film inside their high performance membrane sails with minimal risk of delamina- tion. Layers are laminated in a vacuum and heated evenly to optimum
temperature, then squeezed under extreme pressure by full table
width rollers before being stabilised in a vacuum over a period of weeks at a precisely controlled temperature
dramatically self-destruct halfway through its expected lifespan, you’ll probably be sceptical of Semeraro’s bold claims. However, he has a strong track record of confounding expectations and delivering surprise results in a sailing and technical career that has spanned the Olympics, America’s Cup campaigns and more recently a storming performance in the Middle Sea Race, which he won convincingly in his own self-built yacht.
The secret to making reliable, durable laminate sails is fourfold, Semeraro explains: ‘We believe very strongly in our proprietary, made-in- Italy lamination process. The most important aspects are the glue and the post-cure, but the pressure and the structural skin are also crucial elements. Our whole process is unique and very different. It takes a lot of time and requires a lot of space, so the system we use is not really suitable for a fast-paced industrial organization. We build custom tailored sails of high quality; we do not have the pressure of external shareholders or owners. We aspire to producing fewer, but better products. We know all of our customers by name and we deliver a highly personal service.’ Back in the days when delamination was a widespread problem, Semeraro explains, membrane sailcloth and most of the alternative materials available to
DONATO FASANO
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