A Week's Progress

The mast is assembled. Not without difficulties but, finally, assembled and nearly ready for varnish.

Beginning with four 16' pieces of radiata pine, I cut out the two narrow staves and prepared spacer blocks for the ladder frame, which went together easily enough - but it had a definite asymmetric taper to it. One of the staves was straight (un-tapered) and the other was decidedly more tapered than intended. While I wasn't happy with this, I continued with building the mast.

That the exaggerated asymmetric taper was not going to work easily was apparent when I fit the first wide stave to the ladder frame. The ladder frame would not line up within the 1x4 dimensions of the wide stave. I tried forcing the ladder frame into position - and I could do that. I could even do that with both wide staves. But my concern with forcing the fit was that I would induce some additional twist or bend and end up with a pretzel mast.

The solution I opted for was to remove all but one of the spacer blocks from the ladder frame, cut new spacers, and reassemble the frame paying attention to its alignment in the process. I did not cut out the long block at the foot of the mast. One other possible solution would have been to cut one side of the ladder frame free from the spacers, realign the frame and re-glue it. The happy ending to this step of the process was that ladder frame came out evenly tapered.

After shaping and squaring up the edges of the ladder frame, I was ready to glue the wide staves to the ladder frame. However, I found the assembly method described in the plans to be clumsy, messy and just unworkable for me. That method is to, beginning at the bottom of the mast, align the pieces, clamp the assembly together, wrap it with two or three wraps of packing tape, move the clamp up the mast, reclamp, tape again, and so forth until the entire assembly is clamped/taped. I struggled with handling the three 15'6" pieces while test fitting and dry practice runs of the process. I couldn't imagine trying to handle this process with epoxy added to the mix.

I built a set of stands or props to hold the assembly off the spar bench and to allow room for bar clamps used to hold the mast together. These supports were 75mm x 150mm pieces of 6mm ply screwed to short pieces of 19mm stock, which in turn were screwed to the spar bench. I placed a wide stave on the supports, placed the ladder frame on the stave and then placed the remaining stave on top of the ladder frame. Several dry fits and minor adjustments were needed to get the alignment right.

Once satisfied with the alignment I went ahead with the gluing. I mixed several small batches of epoxy as needed because I did not want a large batch going off before I could finish the gluing sequence. Glued up and held together with 16 bar clamps, the mast was, in rough form, assembled.

When the clamps came off, the wide staves were planed to match the tapered shape of the ladder frame. Hand planes and the ROS were put to good use to bring the assembly to its nearly final form. After trimming the mast to the proper length, I planed the taper in the foot of the mast to fit the mast step. The small router was then used to round-over the edges of the mast.

Those four 16' pieces of 1x4 radiata pine I began with are now a mast! I am waiting for the fiberglass cloth I ordered to arrive so I can reinforce the ends of the mast as described in the plans. Once reinforced with FG, the mast will be ready to varnish.

I am pleased that I took the time to correct the obvious problem with the ladder frame. There was a time not so long ago I would have shrugged and plodded forward - forever unhappy with the results. I am happy with how I built the mast.

In the meantime, I am working on repairing the transom seams, the dagger-board slot in the hull and preparing the hull and foils for paint.