KX09 material with Kevlar Tapes

Laminate is a fancy word for a sailcloth made up of different layers of materials that are glued (or laminated ) together. UK-Halsey Tape-Drive laminates usually consist of three or four materials that each accomplish a separate function to enhance the of the laminate and thus the sail that's made out of it. these four materails are films, scrims, X-plys and taffetas.

FILM The most obvious material in a laminate sail is the film. The most commonly used film is DuPont's Mylar. Mylar is a polyester film that is very strong, highly resistant to stretch, and transparent. In the past, many sailmakers have made sails of nothing but Mylar and in some cases they have proven to be very fast. The only problem is durability. Mylar tears easily and is very susceptable to abrasion damage. In practice, sails made of only Mylar were short lived and often failed catastrophically.

SCRIMS Scrims are coarse weaves of heavy denier yarns like fish nets. Usually, the yarns in a scrim run at right angles to each other and the strength they add to a laminate is greatest along the direction of the threadlines. They can be made of just about any kind of yarn but are typically high modulus yarns such as Kevlar or Spectra. When laminated between two pieces of Mylar film, they provide greatly increased tear strength and stretch resistance while adding very little weight. Once again, many sailmakers use laminates of Mylar and scrim to make their sails and when compared to sails of plain Mylar, they are just as fast with dramatically improved durability.

Other UK sail materials

X-PLYS As noted above, the scrims provide the majority of strength in two directions, at right angles to each other. This is much the way the warp and fill of a woven fabric behave. It was originally thought that the film would provide all the off threadline stretch resistance that would be needed. However, tests demonstrated that the addition of an additional high modulus thread at some angle to the threadlines of the scrim was desireable so the X-PLY was born. Its name comes from the obvious. Any laminate with an X-Ply looks like it's covered with x's.

TAFFETA In sails that where logevity is particularly important, the addition of a covering fabric to protect from abrasion and to some degree, ultra-violet degradation, a light weight woven taffeta can be laminated to one or both sides. The taffeta also gives sewing machine stitching something to hold to in areas where something more than gluing is necessary. Taffetas do very little for the strength of the laminate and tend to increase its weight by a lot so they are sometimes only used on one side of a laminate.

Other UK sail materials

SUMMARY

All of the above ingredients can be mixed and matched to provide a laminate exactly suited for the intended purpose. For instance, our heavy weight Kevlar laminate has a 6x6 Kevlar Scrim made up of 1140 denier yarns. The X-Ply is also 1140 denier Kevlar. It is laminated between a 1.5 mil Mylar and a 1 mil Mylar giving a total of 2-1/2 mils. Very strong stuff! A light weight alternative might have a less dense thread count of a smaller denier yarn, perhaps no X-PLY and a total thickness of 3/4 of a mil of Mylar. Quite a difference! The amazing thing is that the heavy weight laminate weighs only about 3 ounces, the light weight around 1 oz. Yet, when coupled with our patented Tape-Drive structure, the sails not only withstand the worst of conditions but hold their designed shape while doing so.