Mainsail Uni-Titanium

for racing sailboatscarbonmembrane

Uni-Titanium sails are the fastest sails UK Sailmakers makes and that claim is backed up by the fact that customers sailing with Uni-Titanium sails have been able to increase their upwind target speeds compared to pervious sails. If you’re interested in making your boat sail as fast as possible, it’s important that you understand what makes Uni-Titanium so different. Uni Benefits Before the development of Uni-Titanium, all sails suffered from shape instability: in puffs the sail gets deeper and the draft moves aft, when the wind softens the opposite happens. Even with string sails, shape instability comes from the fact that most of the loadpath yarns run parallel to the leech or luff – along the sail’s primary loadpaths. There is not enough stability in the pure loadpath design for the sail to compensate fully for secondary and tertiary loads. Uni-Titanium Construction To overcome these performance-robbing shape distortion issues, UK Sailmakers developed Uni-Titanium, membrane sails with sheets of uni-directional carbon added to the continuous carbon fiber yarn layout in a leach to luff orientation. The uni-directional carbon sheets used have the thickness of magnetic tape and are just as light. The four layers in a Uni-Titanium sail (Mylar, loadpath yarns, uni-carbon layer and second Mylar layer) are placed in a variable geometry thermo form in which the sail is UV-bonded under vacuum pressure to become a one-piece finished sail. The result is a sail that holds its shape in puffs and lulls. In fact, Uni-Titanium sails hold their shape until a sail trimmer makes an adjustment to change the sail’s shape.