Raasay - Sprayhood Windows

Raasay - Sprayhood Windows, a set on Flickr.

Raasay's old sprayhood is worn, but still functional (after some minor repairs). It's biggest defect was that it had no windows.

Given that I will probably be getting the fabric part remade sometime in the next few seasons, I decided to install some windows using a sort of 'tape sandwich' method.

To keep the shape of the sprayhood, I wanted to fix the vinyl in place before cutting the original material. I did this by sticking it to the underlying fabric with double sided tape, but I needed to mask the bits of tape I didn't want to stick to the vinyl (that's what the paper pattern is for).

After sticking it down, I taped the outside with sail repair tape.

I had some help, as you can see.

Then, from the inside, I cut away the original material up to the edge of the pattern (you can see that I accidentally left one or two narrow strips behind in some of the pictures ... I may cover these later.)

Finally, I taped the inside.

It's all a bit of a hatchet job. I kept the windows fairly small and left a space between them - this is where the old compass mount bears on the sprayhood, but it also leaves a useful bit of the original material in high stress area.

The effect from the outside is a little lurid, with the compass mount reinforcement patch making a rather fetching red nose.

But now I can have a look forward from the companionway steps. Quite a luxury ...

I'll report on how strong this turns out to be. I can see some potential problems, but the critical issue will be whether they can be resolved with running repairs (i.e. stitching and more repair tape.)