Master of PBO

Tom Hutchinson, the man behind Future Fibres reveals all about the move away from rod to composite standing rigging

Over the last few years we've seen the increasing acceptance of carbon fibre masts and spars, 3DL and other moulded sails, hi-tech ropes. Now standing rigging is to go through a similar evolution with the increased acceptance of the super-fibre PBO over rod resulting in a dramatic reduction of weight in the rig. Leading the charge in this field is Tom Hutchinson's UK and New Zealand-based company Future Fibres.

Tom Hutchinson is a nervy individual and it is easy to understand why. The use of high modulus carbon fibre for spars many now believe to be the reason for the spate of dismastings over the last couple of years. But whenever the news comes out about another rig atumbling down, if the victim is one of the boats Future Fibres product is fitted on Tom goes through a few anxious hours of heart palpitations waiting to find out the reason for the breakage. Was it his rigging? Or was it the carbon tube that failed? The future of his business rides on the outcome.

Hutchinson has a fairly colourful background. He has several inventors in his family. His great grandfather was the first to come up with the heat exchanger and later developed a technique for welding aluminium. His uncle has created a unique amphibious vehicle that can climb 10ft walls and is used in the oil business in the Arctic.

His school career came to an abrupt end when he decided he'd had enough and walked out, aged 16, never to return. Three weeks later he had landed himself a job serving drinks on a 175ft motor yacht in the Mediterranean. He spent five years on the superyacht trail flitting between the Med, the Caribbean and the east coast of the States before signing up with Riggarna in 1988.

He worked for the riggers for three years before he was sent to San Diego to be the Riggarna representative at the America's Cup. After that event was over he chose to stay in the States and eventually landed himself a job as a rigger for PACT95. He got fired from PACT95 ("I had a broken arm at the time. It was quite hard splicing ropes with a broken arm...") but was immediately employed by OneAustralia supplementing his income by buying carbon fibre in Los Angeles and driving it down to San Diego and selling it to America's Cup teams with a 100% mark up.

Through the America's Cup he met Alex Wadson whose Newport-based company Aramid Rigging was the first choice for making Kevlar backstays. With the cash he made from his time in San Diego Hutchinson returned to the UK to set up the European outlet for Aramid Rigging and worked on Tracy Edwards' Royal & SunAlliance Jules Verne challenger and Laurie Smith's Silk Cut Whitbead campaign.

At the end of 1996 Hutchinson had his brain wave. "I came up with the idea of winding fibre round a couple of thimbles instead of using friction fittings which is what Alex’s system relied on," says Hutchinson. The biggest problem with the manufacture of composite rigging is its termination. All the systems at the time relied on a 'friction fitting' whereby the fibres are effectively clamped in place within the termination. Wrapping a continuous length of fibre around two thimbles neatly solved this problem.

A moot point is that at this time a French company based on Ile de Groix called Chien Noir had come up with the same idea and were not only making backstays but also standing rigging for Open 60s using this same technique. "Truly I did not ever see his product - I saw it afterwards," claims Hutchinson. "I’m sure he did start doing it before me, but it wasn’t that I copied him. I just thought about it and came up with an idea and it just so happens he was doing it as well..."

First to test the product was Mark Turner who at the time was embarking on his Mini Transat campaign alongside a young nipper from Derbyshire. But a much bigger customer was Laurie Smith and Hutchinson was commissioned to make four sets of rigging for Silk Cut.

At this point the fibre Hutchinson was using was predominantly the pale brown liquid crystal polymer Vectran. The cables for Silk Cut were made up in Carbospars shed in Hamble with Hutchinson and his brother wrapping Vectran fibre around two thimbles with the help of a skateboard and then encapsulating the whole package in a heat shrunk cover.

In 1998 Hutchinson heard about PBO. PBO or polyphenylenebenzobisoxazole was a new wonder product sold commercially under the trade name Zylon and made by the Japanese company Toyobo. "We made a test cable, put is on a test bed and started pumping the hydraulic pump and just couldn’t believe our eyes as the need went off the dial," recalls Hutchinson. While a Vectran test cable would break at 6 tonnes, an identical one in PBO would break at 10 tonnes and suffer half the stretch.

By the end of 1998 they had put their first PBO cables on the Dutch 50 footer Exposure and Hutchinson was seeing great possibilities for it in the America's Cup. The Spanish team were the first to adopt it and were followed soon after by Prada. PBO was particularly well suited to Hutchinson's wrapping technique as it is more slippery than other fibres making it harder to terminate it in a friction fitting.

Since then as PBO rigging has found acceptance through the yacht racing world, the basic concept for the Future Fibres system has remained much the same, but, Hutchinson says, the manufacture has seen marked improvement. "You can imagine - you wind a cable on a bed that is not properly made for it, you are holding a spool of fibre, wrapping it round and pulling it up each time to get the tension right. One cable might break at 5 tonnes, the next cable might break at 2 tonnes. There’s just no consistency there.

"The development involved in getting a product with repeatable results is huge. We have a machine that has a carrier that takes the fibre up and down the bed and wraps it around the fittings. It is basically a carrier that flies up and down on a shuttle with a special head that we developed that lays the fibre around the fitting. And not only does it take fibre up and down under a set tension each time, it also positions the fibre on the fitting in the correct place so that you don’t get a build-up in one area. By doing that you are getting rid of all the unknowns."

Similarly the coverings have developed. PBO suffers from degradation from ultra violet light and to salt so it is essential to minimise its exposure to this. Heat shrink works more effectively on rigid items and so Future Fibres today cover the PBO in a variety of resin impregnated braiding before it is encapsulated. This provides a salt water and UV resistant layer with an overall result that is more cable-like than rope-like. Finally the end fittings are put into a mould which is injected with polyurethane, thereby leaving no part of the PBO exposed.

Saying this PBO does seem to be quite resilient. "One great example was Mike Golding sailing up the Atlantic in the last Vendee Globe," says Hutchinson. "He was up the rig doing a rig check. He’d been on the same tack for two days and he’s on the weather side and looking at the capshroud and he sees this huge wear point in the cable. Something had gone more than half way through the cable and it still didn’t break. So we feel pretty comfortable with the safety side."

Another benefit of this technique over rod is that rigging can be engineered more exactly to a yacht or rig designer's specification. "Unlike rod rigging where you have different sizes like –22, -30, -40 we can build a cable to any specification, so the designer can specify exactly the stretch numbers he wants and we’ll hit that number. As opposed to just saying we want it to be somewhere between -30 and -40 therefore we’ll have to go to -40 because -30 is not enough. So it is much more exact in terms of design."

To date Future Fibres cables were used on all the Volvo Ocean Race boats for backstays, checkstays, topmast as well as Code Zero luff cables and furling cables. They had similar success in the latest America's Cup where all the teams save for Team Dennis Conner (who used Aramid Rigging) and Prada (who made their own) used Future Fibres cables.

A more significant development has been the increasingly widespread adoption of PBO cables instead of rod for standing rigging. The Kingfisher Open 60 was fitted with PBO standing rigging following the Vendee Globe but Graham Dalton's Hexagon was fitted with it from the outset. "The most important test results we had were from that boat," says Hutchinson. "She did the entire Around Alone race from America and the first three legs to New Zealand, plus 6,000 miles before the start on one set of cables."

Hutchinson was able to test the V1s after they'd done 25,000 miles and built to 30 tonnes he found one broke at 29.8 tonnes, the other at 30.2 tonnes. "There is almost zero degradation. What it says to us is that it is ideal for standing rigging where the load doesn’t fluctuate."

Fitting PBO standing rigging results in a weight saving of up to 80% compared to rod and becomes all the more attractive the larger the boat. Future Fibres' most recent project has been rigging the new Bols supermaxi where the Future Fibres cables weigh 107kg compared to around 400kg for rod.

The rods on Bols are attached to the end of the spreader and locked in place with a single pin



The rods are divided close to the termination to spread the load over the pin



Right: the pin is inserted through the spreader and the eyes in the rod ends

The downside is that it can be almost twice as expensive as rod. This brings on the Hutchinson patter: "if you are willing to buy a carbon mast over an aluminium mast, the dollar per kilo weight saving for our gear is about one third of the dollar/kilo if you are buying a carbon mast over an aluminium mast."

Obviously weight saved in the rig, reduces rig loads in the hull and allows for weight to be shaved off the bulb. "If the whole boat is designed around this system, with the knock on effect it could well pay for itself. We haven’t worked those numbers out completely," says Hutchinson.

The future is Future

The new Morning Glory and Pyewacket maxZ86s are to have PBO standing rigging as is the new Frank Pong supermaxi under construction in Malaysia. Future Fibres are also moving into the superyacht market.

Aside from selling to the marine industry Future Fibres have a nice sideline in Formula 1 and Indy car racing where teams are obliged under the rules to have a system for ensuring that the wheels do not fly off cars. A Future Fibres cable is just the man for the task.

Hutchinson has many other developments on the go for the yachting market. These include a new system to get rid of turnbuckles. Apparently this doesn't involve lashings - this is favoured by many of the Open 60 campaigns who use these cables.

It is likely that composite standing rigging will be allowed in the next America's Cup but Hutchinson believes this must be highly regulated or it could start a whole new arms race. "It is a difficult one - if the rule makers say anything goes, the development programs will be monstrous. They will be doing all sorts of madness up there - aerofoils, rotating aerofoils, or shrouds with a cord."

Meanwhile next door to Future Fibres in Auckland Southern Spars are launching their latest in composite standing rigging using bundled carbon fibre 1mm diameter rods.

There are currently a number of other wonder products in development to take over from PBO. One is called M5. These products will be less fragile, stiffer, stronger and less susceptible to UV. "At the moment we are using PBO because it is the stiffest material we can get which will go round the corners. You can probably use a high modulus carbon and have a much stiffer cable but the chances are that it will break down in minutes because it is so brittle."

Know thy fibre:

PBO
Dubbed the 'world's strongest fibre', Zylon®, is made by mixing a polymer called PBO (para-phenylene benzobisoxazole), while forcing it through a spinning machine. Its tensile strength is about 10 times that of steel - a PBO thread only 1 mm thick can hold an object weighing 450 kg

Para-aramids - Kevlar, Technora, Twaron:
Due to their highly oriented, rigid molecular structure, these fibers have very high tenacity and high tensile modulus.

Liquid crystal polymer: Vectran
Vectran is a high-performance, thermoplastic, multifilament yarn, melt-spun from liquid crystal polymer. It has exceptional strength and rigidity and is five times stronger than steel and 10 times stronger than aluminum. The combination of high strength, lack of creep, low moisture absorption, negative coefficient of thermal expansion, excellent chemical resistance and good property retention over a broad temperature range make it a good candidate for ropes and cables.

High density polyethylene: Spectra, Dyneema
HDPE fibres offer strength similar to that of para-aramids.

Future Fibres website: www.futurefibres.co.uk