Opening Your Battens
When your battens arrive they will be zip tied strapped together in a tight coil under a lot of tension.
All you need to open them is a knife or a pair of pliers.
Please do not open your battens near the water. They are under a lot of pressure. You might inadvertently send one of your battens flying into the water instead of into your batten pockets.
We recommend opening your battens on a flat piece of grass. This is because they will hit the ground with a considerable amount of force. The grass will soften the blow and not damage your battens.
Hold down the battens with your leg and aim where the battens will go away from you. Just cut the straps one at a time until they are free.
*Warning – They may Spring loose randomly.*
Viola – Your battens are ready to be measured and cut then installed.
Measuring and Cutting your Battens
This is a straightforward process. All you need is a measuring tape, a saw, a marker, and some masking tape.
First, you need to measure how long you’re going to cut your battens. If you don’t know how long to cut them you can contact us and we’ll let you know or you can put it into your pocket and cut it off where it feels right.
Mark on your batten at the specified length with your marker, now wrap a small amount of masking tape where you marked with your pen. We recommend doing this because most battens are made of fiberglass and will splinter when you saw through it. Doing this reduces splintering from happening.
You should be able to see the line through the tape, now just line up your saw with the line and get to cutting!
Now that your battens have been cut, put them into your pockets and give it some tension to make sure it fits correctly.
We recommend following the philosophy of measuring twice and cutting once to ensure your battens fit and you don’t have to get more.
Installing Your Battens
In the video above you can see the awesome low profile tie in batten enclosure option we put on our sails.
The first step to get using the batten enclosure is stuffing your batten in from the leech of the sail through the hole you’re going to get it just past the webbing strap and take your ring and feed it till it comes out of the slot. The next step is to tie the two rings together, this gives you tension on your battens. This allows us to put a standard non adjustable batten receptacle on the luff of the sail while still having full adjustments off the batten tension off the leech.
What we like to do is tie a quick bowline knot on the first ring then a couple simple loops on the rings back and forth – once your down that you can pull the string and get your tension. Adjust and test it out a few times so that its sitting correctly. Once you have the tension you want. Just finish it off with a couple knots. Tuck in your line and close the batten pocket. That’s it. Off you go sailing.
