Shaping the Mast

This week I started shaping the mast. I actually started last Sunday afternoon but ended up giving up when I decided that the Bosch power plane that I had bought was not going to work. For some reason the engineers at Bosch decided to add several grooves on the front shoe of the plane that was not conducive to planing the mast since initially the mast is not a flat surface with the cedar staves sticking up higher than the poplar stave! So after trying it on one of the sides and seeing how it did an uneven job of planing I promptly gave up and put it back in the box so I could return it to Lowes. I ended up picking up a DeWalt plane which only has one grove in the front shoe that runs down the middle. The only bad thing bout the DeWalt is that it did not come with an adapter for the dust collector and also did not come with a handy little bag like the Bosch did so it makes a massive mess of the garage!

It definitely came in handy for cleaning up the big epoxy runs that squeezed out from the joints. Basically I used the power plane to clean up the majority of each surface and then came back with the number 5 hand plane to get it exact. I must admit that there is a certain Zen to using the hand plane that you don't get with power tools - although that being said there is also a certain Zen about not ramming into epoxy globs with the hand plane also!

Once I got all eight sides cleaned up I proceeded to start rounding the back side of the mast. The first step was to locate the center of each of the sides. The next step was to double the amount of faces to get the mast closer to round. Basically the idea is to go from 8 faces to 16 faces - or in this case from 5 faces to 10 (since I'm only doing half the mast). I figured out the offsets from the center line and drew in a set of offset lines. I then used these lines as guides to help me plane in the extra faces. Once the extra faces were planed in I then finished up with the hand plane and knocked off the ridges between each of the faces.

Next step was to build a boxed sander to start the sanding process (A nice little hint that I picked up from some on-line research). I ended up using some scrap poplar along with some wooden handles that where left over from another project that I have been storing in my garage for the past 7 years! I then spent some quality time with it and 80 grit sand paper that I loaded into it. Nice thing about the Cedar is that it is really easy to sand!

It did a passable job of getting the mast round without a whole lot of effort.

Next step is to round off the bottom part of the mast and then it's off to work on another one of the spars!

Bowsprit / Top mast

This weekend I decided to tackle that last two spars on the boat: The bowsprit and the top mast. First step was to mark the tapers on the cedar staves. Both of them taper from 32mm to 15 mm with the top mast being asymmetrical and the bowsprit being symmetrical. I used the 8' level for a straight edge which did the job just fine! The only thing I had to be careful about was that a few of the staves have started to warp and have gotten a small horizontal bend in them, so I had to make sure that they where straight when I marked the line.

I ended up following Dudley's instructions and marked two staves on opposite faces and them clamped all four together and used a #5 plane to shape the wood to the line.

After that I re-set up the mast support and used it as a cradle for both the spars. I performed a test fit of the pieces prior to the glue up.

Bowsprit being test fitted

Top Mast being test fitted

A Couple of interesting observations:

Firstly the plans does not give a core section for the end of the bowsprit (There really is not a lot of information on it) - It is the same as the top section of the mast.

Secondly the dimensions on the plan for the top mast middle core section where the spinnaker block attaches is too small of a diameter. I ended up using a spare piece of the mast core and planed it down to size by trial and error method until I had a snug fit.

I finished up with epoxying everything together with my slow setting epoxy. It's amazing how much of the stuff you go through for this particular operation! Similarly to the boom and the mast I ended up using a combination of 14" long zip ties and clamps to hold everything together while it set up.

Top Mast setting up

Bowsprit setting up

I will let this set up for a couple of days and then start my planning operation to make the spars round. I picked up a Bosch power planner for the job. Will see how well it does!

Building the mast

Well the mast building process ended up being a little bit more work than originally anticipated. After less than satisfactory results on the boom decided to make sure that I had a really good fit on the joints for the Mast.

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!

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!