Making Sawdust

This weekend I turned these planks of Cedar and Poplar (Not the boat!):

Into:

Plus:

Using:

And:

Holy Cow! What a lot of cutting, thickness planing and emptying out the shop vac! I filled half of my trash can with the sawdust from both of these operations!

For the most part everything went smoothly with the exception of my 12' piece of poplar that I had purchased at Home Depot. Just as I finished ripping the portion I was going to use for the boom I noticed a massive horizontal curve in the plank. I'm pretty certain it was not that crooked when I bought it, therefore, all I can think off is with the weather heating up the board just warped in the garage. As I was debating on weather I was going to use it, I started running it through the thickness planer. During this operation I noticed that this board had a ton of small knots that where chipping out real bad. I took this as a bad omen and decided to call it quits on this board and go back to Home Depot for a new one! (I imagine that all the knots in this structural piece of wood would spell troubles later on). The new piece is definitely a nicer piece of wood, and I'm sure I'll find some other use for the other piece on some future project. Other than that I was surprised how close everything came out with regards to the fact that I had little to no excess on the Cedar. Looks like my careful planning on how I was going to cut the lumber paid off!

Now I have a neat stack ready for routing the birdsmouth and scarfing the pieces of the mast together.

Next steps is to glue up the inside cores for the mast, boom and bowsprit, a little routing, and scarfing and It will be time to put these thing together!