The process began with cutting all the staves to the correct length and running the poplar staves through the router. I then performed a test fit of the entire system and found out that I was having less the perfect joints. I spent some time looking at it and decided that the birdmouth joints needed to be a little deeper than first routed. I spent some time testing some different depths with some extra cutoff pieces that I had of the poplar and once I hit the spot I re-ran all the poplar staves through the router.
My goal was to epoxy up the mast during one of the evenings last week but due to a busy schedule It was not looking good. In the end a bout of indigestion after having some pre-cinco de mayo maragaritas and chips on Wednesday night woke me up at 1:00 AM in the morning, so I decided the best thing was to be up and about versus suffering in bed. So voila! an opportunity presented itself and I went for it. Needless to say it was after 3:00 before I finally went to bed!
A couple of interesting observations - Firstly the caulking gun tubes didn't work out as great as originally planned since once you started to fill the birdsmouth with epoxy it pretty much ate a tube per stave - So considering I had two tubes and 4 staves - you can do the math! Also at $20 per tube it was not exactly cheap! (I had anticipated that the 3 tubes I bought would do all 4 spar sections!) Luckily I had ordered the slow set epoxy so I mixed a couple of large batches of the stuff, put it into a zip lop baggie and used it for the last 2 staves!
After all was said and done I zipped tied everything together and added all the clamps I had on it!
I let everything set for a few days to make sure I did not experience any creep. This was especially relevant due to the slow set epoxy that I used that was still tacky 4 hours after I used it (I checked it out a 7:00AM before going to work the day after!).
I finally unzipped and took the clamps off today. I ended up with a bit of a gap on a portion of the bottom poplar stave which was a little disappointing considering everything else turned out good (did not see it since I did not rotate the mast prior to everything setting up!) It's not the end of the world but it just sucked that after all that I was hoping for perfection! I also found out that the mast is definitely a little on the bendy side!
As you can see the mast is somewhat bigger than the boom!
Next steps is to make the top mast and bowsprit followed by rounding the spars off - more to follow on both!
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