First was gluing the mast up. This now just needs the starboard panel installed to finish. I need to run the internal wiring for the VHF antenna and the masthead lights before this happens, but it will be a straight forward simple job.
To get the sticky stuff over with I also laminated the tiller. Once again it will need some finishing and trimming but other than that another tick off the list.
Well at long last the weather has improved enough to make a start on the boat again. So what's with all the shavings?
First off was the completion of the boom and yard, with work on the Yolah ongoing.
Then work started in earnest on the mast. Today I got more or less all the pieces planed to size, I say almost, because it still needs a little bit of trimming here and there to bring the dimensions down to size.It's starting to look good, and a quick clamp up of the parts is promising. I'll continue to work on this with the goal of gluing it up once I have a fine warm day.
From left to right:
Yolah, yard, boom, Mast (p side, front, back, s side)
Mast clamped together
Pointing towards the blue sky!
In a departure from spar making, I've also been fabricating the tiller. This will be made by laminating Mahogany and White Oak to give it a nice appearance, even though no one will ever see it! (gluten for punishment). First job of course is ripping the laminates from a piece of stock, so the table saw was pressed into action. A jointer was then used to clean up and make the strips of uniform thickness (7 in total). The tiller has a very pronounced bend and making the strips any thicker would have made for an impossible bend.
The strips were placed on a jig and clamped into place.
Tiller Jig
(plywood mock up in background, used to establish clearance above transom baffle)
It was pretty obvious that to acquire the bend was going to take some steaming, so once again the steam cleaner was resurrected from the garage, a steam box fabricated and the wood given a bit of a cooking. Once done the strips bent nicely into position. Once again I'll glue together once a nice Epoxy day comes along!
Tiller clamped on Jig.
That's mostly it for now. More later.
