Saturday

I finished up the saw horses - and learned something along the way.

Yesterday my new cordless screw driver struggled with 3" screws unless I drilled pilot holes. It was fine with 2" screws but those seemed to be too short for securely holding 2x4s together. Decided last night to get some 2 1/2" screws for the second saw horse.

I went to the nearby hardware store and was surprised that they did not have any deck screws with a Phillips head configuration. They did have screws with a Lox head which seemed to be what was described in a Storer forum thread earlier in the week. I, of course, discounted the square drive described as a "new fangled" contraption... Well, today I bought these screws with the Lox drive (a driver bit came with the screws). I am now convinced... this is a much better system that the Phillips head. The driver did not struggle at all with these screws and I did not have to use pilot holes.

That was the good news.

The bad news? My mast is going to cost more than $16.

The "primed spruce facia" available for $4 a board seemed like a bargain. A friend wondered about the quality of the wood beneath the primer, so I bought a single board to find out. Using the new ROS (it worked well) I removed the primer (paint not stain) to find two issues. First, small knots pretty well spread throughout the piece. Not a lot, and I could work around them.



The second issue is, however, a deal breaker as far as the mast is concerned. I noticed very straight and very fine lines across the width of the board with different grain patterns on either side of the lines. Uh oh... I took the block plane to the edge of the board to find this:



I counted 12 finger joints in the samples I brought home yesterday (it was a single 16' piece cut in half to make it easy to transport). The actual wood material is really nice but that many finger joints makes it unsuitable for the mast. I may be able to use it for the chine logs (different loads and stresses). I could probably use it for the gunwales, too, but the finger joints would be a visual distraction.

Work continues. I am marking out the hull panels on the plywood today, and expect to cut them tomorrow.