Bowsprit / Secret Weapon

Well the bowsprit is not the secret weapon of the title the portable swamp cooler shown below is!

This weekend the temperature got up to 108 degrees F which in short is: HOT!!! So Friday night my wife and I hit the Home Depot / Lowes circuit and purchased the portable swamp cooler. I tried it out this weekend and it made a huge difference - As long as it is blowing directly on you it makes working in the garage bearable!

Well enough about that! This weekend my goal was to shape the bowsprit. So first step was to figure out how I was going to plane in the additional faces. As with the boom I took the bowsprit in the house and my wife and I sat down and marked up the centers of all eight faces followed by the other eight faces for the initial non tapering part of the bowsprit (the aft end). Once I got to the tapered part things where not quite cut and dried since even though the tapered end had eight faces it is closer to square than an octagon.  So I before finalizing my "planing" lines I decided to get the end closer to an octagon so out came the hand plane!

Bowsprit Ready for Shaping

Tapered End Planed to an Octagonal Shape

Once that was done it was pretty easy to figure out my "planing" lines and cut in the additional 8 faces using my trusty No. 5 plane.

Well it turns out that it took a little bit more effort to do the shaping on this spar than what I initially anticipated. The main reason behind this is that you build the spar using the same dimensional pieces as the mast with the exception that it is actually a couple of millimeters narrower in diameter. So after I used the box sander to get it to the initial round shape I used my electronic micrometer to check the diameter. As expected it was 63 mm vs 61 mm. So out came the hand plane to take off the extra material! I alternated between the hand plane and micrometer to make sure I did not take off to much material and also to make sure it was round. This particular spar has to fit through a hole in the bow transom so it's a little bit more critical that it is perfectly  round!

Finished Product!

Next step for this particular spar is to wrap both ends with fiberglass followed by a good sanding/epoxying/varnishing!

Next Steps will be either the fiberglassing this spar, the connector tube between the top/bottom mast or the sail track - We will see!