More than one person has asked about alignment techniques recently and if you look at who’s coming sailing these days, it is lots of new helmets and goggles.

Lloyd Roberts taught us all to use the dial indicator on a rod, but the triangles are a better way. Here’s a brief demonstration of how alignment triangles work.

This is just a demo set up. The plank is eliminated for clarity.
The boat is sitting on the plank, the runners are in the chocks, the bow is blocked up to the hight simulating the bow runner in place.
Each runner is placed on the fixture guides on top of its triangle., one per side, as shown above.

There is a scribe mark on the triangle indicating fore and aft location. Square down from the pivot bolt to this line. Be sure to set the bolt head so one facet is plumb, and register both runner bolts from the same side!
Load the boat with the skipper’s weight and check the string.

Looking closely at the photo above you’ll see a string that runs between the triangles. There is a scribe line that’s dead square to the fixtures in which the runners are set. In the photo above you can see that the string and the line are not together. This is mis-alignment and must be corrected with shims on the runner, or worse case, chock moved. But it must be done.

Here you can’t see the scribe because it is directly under the string. This is the result you want. It might take a few fittings and shimmings to get there, but the sailing experience will be well worth the effort.

Speaking of Sailing Experiance, the weather is looking good for Fri-Sat-Sun on Damariscotta depending on how the surface winds up at the end of tomorrow’s rain. There’s not much rain, and the lake needs no further wetting out, just a cold snap and it looks like Thursday night will do it. Not much wind until later on Friday.
We’ll have a look Thursday afternoon and report here. It will be a crap shoot for Friday anyway. It will be either Lake Farm or Vannah Rd.