Inside the Fabrica Workshop: How Synthetic Rigging Is Actually Made

In the last post we walked through why Paikea’s stays needed replacing, and why we landed on continuous filament, unidirectional Dyneema DM20 rather than going like-for-like with wire. That post ended with a promise: we’d head to the Fabrica factory to see how these stays actually get built. This is that visit.

Who’s actually building this

Fabrica is a rigging house based in Valencia, and we sat down with Mateus, their commercial and marketing manager, to walk through what the workshop actually does. It’s a wider scope than just sidestays — they build unidirectional, continuous, and discontinuous cable for both sailing and industrial applications, covering lateral rigging, fore-and-aft rigging, and torsional cable, plus custom carbon interface hardware for boats trying to get weight and centre of gravity out of the rig.

The continuous-versus-discontinuous distinction is worth understanding if you’re speccing rigging yourself. A continuous stay is one piece running the full length, connected at a single point at the deck. A discontinuous rig breaks the standing rigging into separate link elements — chainplate to first spreader, spreader to spreader, spreader to masthead — each one its own piece. It’s the same basic choice you’d find between a one-piece rod rig and a discontinuous rod rig, just applied to fibre instead of metal, and it changes how the boat’s spec, inspection, and replacement all work.

Building the actual cable

The part that surprised us most was the winding machine — a DM20 winder that takes raw fibre straight off the creel (the spool it’s supplied on) and winds it to the exact specified stay length. Rather than running a single creel back and forth to build up the fibre count, Fabrica gangs four creels together and winds from all of them at once.

The reason that matters isn’t just efficiency. The whole machine is built around a tension-control system that keeps identical, constant tension across every fibre as it’s wound. That’s the actual engineering point: if one fibre goes on looser than the others, it won’t start carrying load until the rest of the stay has already stretched to take up that slack — meaning it never shares the load evenly, no matter how strong it is on paper. Winding under matched tension is what makes every fibre in the finished stay load and lengthen together, which is the difference between a stay that performs to its rated strength and one that quietly underperforms it from day one.

What holds up over time

A stay isn’t just judged on how it’s built — it’s judged on how it survives being used. Fabrica talked us through where synthetic rigging actually wears: chafe protection covers, and what’s underneath them. The core of a synthetic stay is what’s carrying the load, and a chafe cover’s job is to keep anything from reaching it — a rubbing genoa sheet is the most common culprit in the real world. Once a cover is worn enough to expose the core underneath, that’s the point Fabrica flagged as the actual danger zone, worth catching on inspection long before it becomes a problem.

The end fittings matter just as much as the cable itself. Fabrica cast their terminals in UV-stable polyurethane rather than leaving them as bare fibre — a detail that’s easy to miss looking at a finished stay, but it’s doing real work protecting the part of the cable that takes the highest concentrated load.

Not all Dyneema is the same Dyneema

One thing that comes up constantly with synthetic rigging, and that Fabrica were clear about, is that “Dyneema” isn’t one material with one set of properties. We touched on this briefly in the last post when we explained why we chose DM20 over SK78 and SK99 — this is the deeper version of that answer.

SK99 has the highest raw breaking strength of the group. On paper, that makes it look like the obvious choice. In practice, it’s a poor choice for standing rigging, because it creeps — it elongates permanently under sustained load over time, which is exactly the wrong property for a stay that’s meant to hold a fixed geometry for years. DM20 gives up some of that raw strength, but it’s dimensionally stable, which is why it’s the material Fabrica — and we — use for standing rigging. SK99 still has a real job to do elsewhere: running backstays, furling cables, anything where the load is more cyclical and creep matters far less than raw strength and cost.

It’s a good example of why “strongest material” and “right material” aren’t the same question, and why we ended up back at DM20 having seen the alternatives up close.

In the Library

Want the full story on Paikea’s move to synthetic rigging — including the Fabrica workshop visit and how the headstay furling problem got solved? Head to Paikea’s Synthetic Rigging.

Want the full breakdown on rig loads and tuning? Should Sidestays Break? walks through this exact failure mode in more detail, and Why Weight Is Critical on Your Multihull covers the righting moment math behind everything here. For the whole picture on how Paikea’s rig is set up, start at the Performance Sailing Hub.

Members get the extended cut of this Fabrica visit — including the full safety factor breakdown, how we actually measured Paikea’s stays, the synthetic loop and strop engineering, and Fabrica’s on-site mini-braider tool — over on the Members Library.