by GreenLake » Thu Jun 09, 2011 9:23 pm
There are two angles. The fore and aft and the vertical angle.
Assuming that he fixtures are designed to hold your spreaders at the correct fore and aft angle, a two-hole design would better support vertical loads that come from a small misalignment of the spreaders.
The way the fittings on my boat are designed they are very sensitive to vertical loads, while at the same time making it difficult to position the spreaders correctly to minimize those loads (they are factory original, but O'Day apparently substituted the Javelin version on a few of the boats they built).
What you want is to bisect the angle of the shroud, and that means having the spreaders ever so slightly point upward. Only then will there be 0 vertical loads. My fittings don't really allow that much vertical movement, and the previous set of spreaders broke from excess vertical loads at the pin.
A two hole design should provide more definite support, so as long as the horizontal angle is correct, it might provide some advantage. If the horizontal angle is not correct, or if it changes with sailing loads, then a fixed support would also have to hold horizontal loads - and those can be considerable.
That's all the thoughts I have on this subject.
~ green ~ lake ~ ~