A few toggle design choices

[Joe Henderson]

Dear Paramita,

Listen to Brion, you are getting free advice worth it's weight in gold...or non-broken masts.

If you wanted to create and examine a stress raiser in the laboratory, you could do no better than obtain a Gibb/Navtec Tee terminal.

They were marginal in the seventies, have not been improved by the manufacturing facility being shuttled from pillar to post in the last ten years or so as large machine shops bought and sold the rights to the design with not much regard to the end user.

The last lot I received looked like they had been made in some back street hovel in Karachi. I am always suspicious of bent or "Forged" stainless fittings that have been linished all over, they had obviously been worked to within an inch of thier lives.

Gibb managed, through a triumph of development over design, to make the things fairly reliable.

They paid attention to material specs, carefully controlled the pre-heating of the area of the upset forging of the head and flattened the head, gripped the tip and bent the radius of the neck all in one motion on a fairly complex jig.

All this was done by the same couple of chaps for the duration of the production in Warsah. When M.S.Gibb got sold, I asked if the tooling and expertise went with the sale, " Dunno" was the answer!

The manufacturers are aware of the shortcomings of the design, Vis the missive about the terminals not being reccomended for Dyform wire.

This is why the spade type shroud terminal from the same makers was instigated

The last word about the things is best from Johnny Green, late of Sparcraft UK.

They would only use them for checkstays....or stirring their tea... or, at a pinch, as fishing weights.

Then again, Sparcraft would not allow a concentrated loadpath to pass through a weld either.

Solid engineering expertise and experience, you see, just like Brions advice.

Good luck,

Joe.