Boom Boom!

My weekend started with a trip on Friday to the lumber store to pick up some lumber to make the cores for the spars. After doing some inventory on the left over Cedar from the staves for the spars I noticed that I was short what I needed to make the cores. I decided to go ahead and buy a 2 inch thick plank so that I did not have to glue up a couple of boards to get the correct thickness (Which regardless would couple of mm short in thickness for the mast cores).

First order of business was cutting the plank to size and making the octagonal blanks and cutting them down to size.

Next step was to set the router table up to cut the birds mouth into the poplar staves. I ended up using 4 sets of feather boards to make sure that everything was solid. It actually worked very well!

Another important step was to get the mast supports attached to the beam I had assembled a few weeks ago. I decided to forgo cutting kerfs into the support, and instead decided to attach the supports using small blocks and my nail gun. First step was to level the beam in the vertical plane which I accomplished using my 8' level. I then attached the supports using the joint of the beam as my center. I finally made sure that any bends in the beam where taken out using a laser as a guide.

finished product turned out good

With the support finished I proceeded to dry fit the boom components. I ended up doing some adjustments to the boom cores using my joiner and then dry fitted the whole assembly to make sure it went together well prior epoxying it all up.

I followed up with epoxying everything together and making sure it was all tightly clamped using both zip ties and regular clamps. I used System 3's epoxy system tube with mixing nozzle that fits a caulking gun to make life easier which although was expensive ($20 per tube) worked out pretty well, and made the epoxying process a whole lot less complicated! An interesting observation that I made while examining the plans for boom core locations was that I noticed that the boom is not symmetrical with regards to the placement of the boom cores, therefore I made sure to mark an "M" on the mast side of the boom core!

A few lessons learned from this first spar: Firstly don't be stingy on filling the birds mouth with epoxy - I definitely could have been a little less stingy - a few of my joints could have filled out better with epoxy (I ended up going back afterwards and adding some additional epoxy into a couple of the joints), which leads to the second lesson learned - I could have made the joints a little tighter. During the test fitting it looked like everything was good and tight but once I glued everything up I noticed it could have been tighter. Interesting enough when I looked at my close up picture that I took prior to epoxying the staves up I can see that things could have been tighter (it might be time to break down and get glasses!)

As the boom was setting up I spent some time making a jig for the table saw to cut the scarfs into the staves for the mast. Dudley's plans suggest using a hand plane, but I was convinced there was an easier way to do this. So I used a few scraps of wood to make this jig. It worked out very nicely and made some nice scarf joints!

I then epoxied everything up and let is sit overnight.

Sunday morning I took the clamps apart - The joints turned out pretty good with the exception of one of the poplar staves which I ended up redoing. I also went ahead and cut all the remaining staves to the correct length making sure to leave an extra 10mm of length on each stave to allow for some wiggle room while epoxying everything up. I also set up the router table to do the birds mouth on the poplar staves for the bowsprit and top mast section.

My goal for this next week is to route the birds mouth into the poplar mast staves and hopefully assemble the mast. The temperature is beginning to warm up here and the mast is going to be a major epoxying operation!