Hollow Mast Wood

Hey, Paul. I really like your method for building a round spar. It looks like it it considerably less fiddly than using the birds mouth method.



How to you go about holding the orange triangular pieces in place while the epoxy takes a set. I'm assuming you're not using any sort of temporary fasteners that will leave visible holes in the spars. There are many places I would use a piece like this, but go square or rectangular so I'm able to clamp it.

Sorry for the hijack, Allen.

 

No problem LP, it's all relevant info!

Cheers, Allen

 

Because the rough stave assembly is square, I simply make a 90 degree jig to hold the mast pieces in halves. I place them side by side, so the internal corner reinforcements can nest in the one corner, buttered up as usual. The other corner rests along the edge of the stave rabbet, with a temporary stave thickness spacer (actually I use multiple little spacers). This way, I can align everything neatly, insuring it stays square and if necessary a small finish nail, partly driven into any wayward corner reinforcements that try to cup, twist or other wise escape my insistence they stay put.

I don't have pictures of the last one I did, which was quite recently, but the whole setup, including dry run for the goo session was about an hour for a 16' stick. The actual glue up took less than an hour, including smearing the ooze out along the reinforcements.

After the two halves are cured and dressed up a bit, the swallowtails are installed and the two halves joined at this time, again about an hour, assuming your dry run was clean and everything fit nice. I did clamp the assembled stick against a set of blocks and the table, to insure it was still going to be square, but made no attempt to clean up ooze out other then the big gobs and major drips. Once this was cured, temporary nails pulled, it was 8, then 16 sided with a power plane and a magic marker. I switch to a pencil for the final sanding process, after filling any gaps in the 4 visible seams.

 

Heres something a little different for those interested in a foil shaped mast.

https://www.ice.idniyra.org/Articles/Masts/A-Wood-Mast-Made-Easy