Shaping the Boom

After taking a weekend off to go to California I decided to tackle the boom next.

During the weekday my daughter was kind enough to help me scribe the lines on the boom to locate the center of each face and to also add the planing lines to go from eight faces to 16. This effort definitely took some time and it was nice to have someone help me! It was also something I ended up doing on the living room floor which was also nice!

Additional Faces Scribed In

Once again I brought out my trusty number 5 plane and planed in the extra eight faces. I decided to forgo the power planer on this exercise since there really was not a whole lot of wood to take off and I wanted to have better control over what was happening.

Once the additional eight faces where planed in I decided to build a couple of supports from scrap pieces of wood so that I could clamp the boom to the saw horses and have it spin freely for the sanding process.

Again I used the boxed sander to get it to a round shape. It's pretty close to round right now. My plan is to finish it up with 100, 150 and 220 grit sand paper and hopefully get any imperfections out at that point.

I need to build the cleats for the boom which I think I may make out of some spare mahogany that I have left over.

Things are heating up in Arizona so I am getting relegated to working in the mornings before it gets to obnoxiously hot. Still on the agenda is shaping the bowsprit and building the sail track from plans provided by François Marti who funnily enough built hull #39! I also have to build the fiberglass tube that connects the lower mast with the top mast - still thinking on that one!