I have recently rescued a very elderly Firefly from the Club park, which I would like to use for single-handed bimbling when  I don't have a crew for the Merlin.  The mast and rigging have me completely confused.  It's obviously a Mk 1 Firefly, original number not known.  The mast is a rotating Reynolds mast (as I think it is called) with a wooden, untapered top section.  There is one set of diamonds.  Questions:

1.  Should there by an upper set of diamonds as well?  The lower attachments are on the mast, there is a hole where an upper attachment might have gone, and the forward facing fixed spreaders came loose with the boat.  Is it necessary?  What tension?

2.  The mast rotates but there is a huge amount of play in the gate, about one or two centimetres all round.  Should there be a collar?

3.  The jib halyard goes over a block at the top of the forestay.  My recollection of sailing Fireflies thirty years ago is that it should then go down to a hole in the forestay plate at the bow, through a block mounted on the inside of the stem and run back to a cleat under the side deck.  Tension is then achieved by a simple toothed rack.  Everything is there except the hole in the forestay plate.  There are several more cleats and blocks under the foredeck but no obvious way to transfer the run of the forestay to them.  

Suggestions please (including the whereabouts of a more modern mast, but not involving an axe and a box of matches).

P.S.  The Firefly website has had the questions for 48 hours without a single reaction.

P.P.S.  Suggestions as to where the number might be on a really old boat would also be welcome.  Not on thwart, centreboard casing or outside of transom.  Hog and inside of transom heavily overpainted and epoxied, I suspect to kill any rot.

Answers
1 = No
2 = Yes
3 = Your memory is correct.
Good luck.

From memory the other great features of very early Fireflies (King's College London Sailing Club used to have 4 in varying degrees of decrepitude) were the cheesewire kicking strap that ran to a drum at the foot of the mast from an attachment point a long way back on the boom and a heavy metal centreplate with a block and tackle on the top of it so that if the kicker didn't remove an upper body part when tacking the centreplate removed a lower one.  With luck and a bit of brute force the jib arrangement hanked onto it's own halliard as it went up would just about get enough rig tension to stop the mast actually flopping about in the boat.

The collar was a 2 part tufnol block shaped to fit the mast on the inside. Most people sailed with very little tension on the diamonds so that not many of the reynolds masts have survived on hard raced boats. (I have three but they were my fathers who was much kinder on his mast) In the mid 70's a proctor C section was allowed that does not rotate. This is easy to fit and you may be able to find an old one arround as they did not break so easily. The kicking strap was also moved to a point further forward on the boom. And just to show that crews today are totally spoilt they moved the boom position up to give more room for the crew (or was it just the helms were getting older and could not get under the boom. My solution was to start sailing Merlins.

You would get much more information from the CVRDA website than the Firefly site.

Nick

From memories of uni racing in 1960 Mallorcan Correspondent is dead right. To add a bit of help:- It doesn't matter a tuppenny toss where the jib halyard runs as long as it holds the jib and mast up and is well secured - unless you are hell bent on class racing and the Firefly rules have a specific method.
Good luck with the restore.
Mike

interesting that the first firefly in the warming pan was a restored 48 year old boat no. 498, second was 3841