Because cleaning is just cosmetics, sails get worse by washing only

Textile engineering & chemical know how

Sails normally get cleaned when they have a certain age. By then, they have lost most of their protective mechanisms. In a cleaning process, it's exactly these protective mechanisms of the sail, that will allways be ruined, the sail will be in consequence even more vulnerable than before. Without replacement of these protective mechanisms, the sail offers open access to humidity. With the humidity, micro organisms and pollutions find their way into the fabric. Resins in combination with oleo- and hydrophobic molecules supply the neccessary protection and contribute to a good haptic quality and rigidity of the sail. This has already been done in the production of your sails fabric.

One sail made of 2 fabrics, left a laminate with textile tafetta and right a dacron fabric, both well protected again.

PRO-2 Sail Regeneration as preventive treatment

Sails that are treated at the right moment, before the entire loss of their original protection and ridigity, can supply much longer pleasure in sailing, due to their maintained haptic and visual quality impression. The right moment shows with decreasing rigidity, less zissling when folding and fading hydrophobicity. Test your sail: A few drops of water, absorbed by the sail, tell everything - it's time to act.

Old & new, both suitable for the PRO-2 Regeneration process                     Before-After: Clean, strengthened with new haptic properties

Touching up a sail is more than most people know

The benefits from a chemical rearmament of an old sail is more versatile than you probably expect: Profile, rigidity, haptic and protection. The treatment of the outstanding resistant Dacron fabric can make a sail, even after decades of use, stand and sail properly again! This way is assured, that you can start early with a fresh and crisp set of sails into the new season.

The PRO-2 Sail Regeneration process targets at an amelioration of a sails profile, strength, fabric structure and protective mechanisms. For this we combined a gentle chemical cleaning process with a following regeneration treatment in several steps. There are no machines in the process and no mechanical cleaning steps, that could weaken the actual condition of the sailcloth.

Cleaning
First pollutions are loosened in a chemical bath and rinsed off. Therefor the sail will be rinsed manually, side for side, flattened out in our hangar. After this the sail will be dried the first time. Regeneration & strengthening For the regeneration purpose, the sails receive a new special resin apllication. These will be applyed from both sides of the sail, to penetrate fully into the fabrics matrix. During the bonding process, the sail fabrics tension will reappear for the major part. Then the sail will be drying again, within the bonding process.

A test-sail from our German partner CO-SEGEL: the sails leach is fully UV damaged, broken and torn On this picture the cleaning impact of the RED GULL process can be shown nicely: for the application of new resins it has to be a bit more effective.

Profile & air permeability
Within most sophisticated textile engineering, our chemicals are applied for an almost fully impermeability and amelirated profile. The sail wil be ameliorated obviously compared to it's condition before the treatment, changes are measurable.

A Folkeboat sail, ameliorated in it's profile. The leach is carrying again and in line, the profile moved to the front and the bag at the foot has vanished.

Duration of process
The RED GULL PRO-2 Segel-Regeneration process is a manual process, in which every sail will be worked side by side several times, undergoing drying periods in between. The whole process wil take some 3 - 5 days per sail. Bigger furling genuas can require, due to strongly water absorbing and slow drying furling cushions, significantly more time.

Strengths of the manual processes
In all steps of the process the sails will be under permanent visual controll, allowing an individual treatment of every single sail. This way we can avoid uniform treatment as occuring in machine washing treatments and work the sail precisely acc. its necessities. The manual cleaning process maintains the actual fabrics structure and strength, at individual cleaning intensity. The application of the new resins to the sail can only be carried out manually, due to the 3 dimensional shape of the sail. Evt. automatized processes would force the sail into a 2 dimensional shape.