Boat fittings on the cheap

What do I do about ropes? hardware?? sails???

Your choice again. Cheap doesn't necessarily mean nasty. You can outfit this boat with very little expenditure at the chandlery or you can run riot and sprout super stainless steel fittings everywhere. There are a couple of thousand dollars between these two extremes.

Rope:

Ordinary UV-stabilised silver rope is fine for sheets, topping lifts, and sundry lines but you'll enjoy life more if you pay five times as much and use pre-stretch braided dacron for halliards. The silver rope stretches and drives you nuts if it's being used for halliards, because the sail peaks go all saggy and the jib dies.

On the other hand you can imitate Flying Tadpole II - rig with silver rope, enter a couple of races unwise enough to be offering prize money, win them, then spend the proceeds on "proper" cordage!

Hardware:

Make your own where you can and patronise your local friendly hardware store where you can't. All the cleats (and there are a lot of them) on Flying Tadpole II were handmade from close-grained douglas fir scrap, though a fine grained hardwood would have been better. You have to make the mooring and main sheet cleats in any case.

Cleats are all attached using 1/4 inch galvanised gutter bolts (or a bronze equivalent), countersunk and epoxy filled in the cleat and bolting through to large backing plates made from 1/2" ply scrap. You can get away with galvanised or even just zinc-plated steel fasteners because most are going to be encapsulated in epoxy anyway.

The plans do show a make-your-own brass gudgeon and pintle for the rudder. We gave up at this stage and just bought chandlery gear, which cost.

Use lightweight and oversize blocks for the running rigging. For these, you'll have to visit a chandlery but they're relatively inexpensive.

Remember, one of the points of this design is that crudities are acceptable and often intended. We use zinc-plated snaplinks for fast sheet and halliard attachment. They're one-seventh the price of stainless equivalents. They take two to five years to rust and die, at which point we throw them away. Note that five years is about the time you should be throwing stainless steel fittings away too, if they've been under strain. Want a vang on your foreboom? Two ring bolts and a length of line... everything works without actually looking crude and there's no credit card meltdown.

(Although... one day... we'll surreptitiously buy cam cleats for the staysail... when we've remortgaged the house to pay for them..)

Sails:

Only two ways to go. Make the lot yourself (out of polytarp even!) and spend as little as possible, or get the working sails made by an expert. Either spend next to no money, or don't stint at all.

If you're going to have them professionally made, make sure the sailmakers really know what they're doing. Sailmakers who can cut a good gaff-rigged sail, let alone a matched pair, are few and far between. You can get away with all sorts of terrible things for a staysail, in our case old anchor rope, ducting tape and black polythene concrete underlay.

Flying Tadpole II's sails, and indeed the sails of Lady Kate still in use (2023) with a bit of repair, were made by Ken O'Brien, who died in March 2012. As well as his brilliance in sailmaking for "different" boats, Ken had many other claims to fame, the one most familiar being "chief sailmaker for the historic and successful Australia II campaign in 1983 at Newport, Rhode Island. His contribution is covered in John Bertrand's book "Born to Win". He only saw the last of the seven races because he would work through the night perfecting the sails for each race and sleep during the day. It's the sort of dedication that he was known for in everything he did." (from an obit.) It was also our honour and privilege to have known him, sail-traded with him and spread his beautiful red-and-white staysail creation to the confounding of our race foes. Modest, scrupulously honest, thoroughly trustworthy and a true gentleman...and missed.

For DIY stuff, there's now lots on the web you can find. It comes and goes, like the summer winds...