Does printing add weight to a sail?

Why weight matters more on a spinnaker than anywhere else

A spinnaker is the lightest sail on the boat and the one that has to fill in the least wind. Added weight in the wrong place shows up first as a lazy sail in light air, and second as a sail that will not hold its shape when it collapses and refills.

Weight also has to be judged as weight per square metre across the printed area, not as a total figure. A small logo in the corner and a photograph across the whole sail are very different loads even when the same process is used.

Choosing the process by how much weight the campaign can afford

A sponsor campaign on a used cruising-chute can accept more added weight than an Olympic-level race sail. That trade — visual coverage against grams — is the actual decision, and it is why sailprint.eu keeps four processes rather than one.

For the lightest end of the range, coverage is planned so that colour lands where it is seen from the course and from the camera, not evenly across cloth nobody looks at.

How the four processes compare

Printed layers are measured against paint, because painting is what conventional sail decoration has always meant. Conventional painted sail graphics weigh around 28 g/m². DRY-INK sits at roughly the same weight as paint. SPI-PRINT is lighter. NaNo-Print is lighter again — light enough that measuring it accurately is the actual difficulty, not a marketing claim.

SAIL-STICKER belongs in a different category and has to be judged against a different reference. It is an applied cloth graphic, so the fair comparison is the insignia cloth a loft already uses for numbers and class marks: 135 g/m². SAIL-STICKER weighs 115 g/m². Both go on back to back when the graphic must read from both sides, so the real comparison is 230 against 270 — the sticker is the lighter of the two, not the exotic addition people expect.

Where the numbers come from

NaNo-Print has been tested on cloth from Contender and Dimension-Polyant, including sailcloth for 49er sails — a class where the cloth is about as light as racing sailcloth gets.

But the laboratory is not the real test. sailprint.eu printed its first sailcloth in 1997 and has supplied sails commercially since 2007. Cloth tests tell you what happens on day one. Sails that have been sailed hard and packed a few thousand times tell you what happens in year five.

Balance and symmetry

Where the print sits matters as much as what it weighs. Graphics are laid out so the two halves of the sail stay comparable and the sail sets the same on both gybes.