Hypothetical question - building mast from common wood

pironiero, you're adding complication for nothing with veneers and carbon. You have to make costly molds, and it's a lot of work with sanding each ply. It uses lots of glue (or epoxy resin) and finally it will be heavy. It's risky to make butt joints in a highly stressed mast, you'll have to make hundreds of scarfs to get full length veneers. You'll need a vacuum pump, lots of consumables and you ask for a cheap wood...Think over that.
So no professional with common sense has made masts in cold molded veneers. You can use this method, but you will suffer for an uncertain result, but surely too heavy and expensive.

A mast is mainly longitudinal fibers with a light Nordic pine or spruce of better and clear quality. No knots, quarter sawn, straight fibers. You can add latter transversal strength with 120 or 160 gr satin glass fiber cloth cut at 45 degrees. The cloth will also protect and harden the surface of the mast. Only a simple jig on the floor and plenty of clamps.
That sounds complicated, but it's rather simple in fact for a guy knowing how he has to do the job. It's accessible to the beginner you are, if you read and understand well a good book.

Or you buy chosen first quality battens 21x21 or 27x27 mm, 2.50 m long and will do scarfs to get the length, or you choose at the sawmill only the central planks of the pine trunk and re-cut them in battens.
I've used successfully planed 21x21 mm 2.5 m long battens (from Russia in fact, white light pine no knots) after choosing them in a DIY mega store Leroy Merlin at Paris which sell thousands of them each year. Not the cheapest at first sight, but the wood was nice, all same dimensions, dried, perfectly square with no twisting and already planed.
The job after is easy as you need only a circular saw on a table and a belt sander. I made it in two halfs on a very simple jig bolted on a straight concrete floor. The mast was for a 1000 kg classic small boat, but with these battens sizes you can go far heavier knowing the good dimensions of the mast.
If you buy at the saw mill only the central planks with vertical wood rings, often 27 mm thickness. You cut in the dimensions you need, you dry slowly the wood with all due precautions and plane it finally. You'll have losses, so you have to buy plenty of wood for keeping all the perfect planks and or battens with no twisting after drying. Sometimes you can get perfectly dry planks (kiln or air dried has no importance).
I'm sure, as you are at St Petersburg, that you will find with no pain an ordinary wood that is sold to all Europe. The Swedish sell expensively to the innocent European the Nordic pine they bought cheaply in Russia, after renaming it Swedish Nordic pine and giving some fancy sustainable label.

First thing to do is to read with care the Gougeon Bros book, you'll understand why I write that. Read also some other documentation on wooden masts, there is plenty. You'll get probably all the answers you need.
After, you'll ask the good questions, knowing already the B A BA spelling of the technique.
For the moment, you are only conjecturing on a subject you have very little idea, so I'm unnecessarily answering, wasting my time.

A little question what's the size of the mast and what's the size and displacement of the boat? For a cruising boat no need of carbon fiber and high-tech solutions, keep it simple.

 

You're right for the choice of wood as I do not see difference between a Nordic pine or spruce from Sweden, Finland or Russia. The whole tree was good 200 years ago when you could go in the forest and choose the good tree after examining a few thousands of ones, now you get better and lighter masts laminating.
Ice boat guys need very bendy, nervous and very strong mast as an ice boat is always sailing in the storm of the apparent wind they have created by their speed. The strip wood and fibers mast is a very proven and sure option, far less expensive than the carbon masts, but asking for a shop and time.

 

No such thing,just ways that work and ones that don't you should be able to find the information you need on the Net,I prefer steel but I'm sure Riga Fir would work fine.

 

Riga fir 600 kg/m3 will work but white pine 450 kg/m3 will work as well but being 30% lighter, and that counts a lot for a mast. The final difference, accounting the difference of strength between these woods, of a mast of same resistance will be around 20%. Each kilo above the deck will need several kilos of ballast or will have a cost in the final stability.
Also the Nordic white pine is found everywhere, rather cheaply. It glues extremely well with all the good glues, resorcinol, polyurethane or epoxy. The last one is the easiest and strongest but asks imperatively that the mast must be sealed totally inside and outside with resin.

 

That's really good to know thank you for that.

 

Let's get some things straight, the common trade names of lumber are confusing. There no such thing as Riga fir, it's an invented trade name for the common european red pine.
In Europe there are just a few commonly traded conifers, regardless of what they are called:

First and most important commercially is picea abies, aka. norway/european spruce. Usually sold mixed with spruce is abies alba, aka. european silver fir/true fir. Both this species come in a range of qualities, from plantation grown 350kg/m3 toilet paper stock, to 480kg/m3 tone wood. The normal density for structural work is considered to be 450kg/m3, and both species make very fine masts. Selecting it is just a matter of looking at the growth rings, many thin rings is good.
In Russia, we have a third species, picea obovata, aka. siberian spruce, wich is so closely related to the european spruce there are whole forests of hybrids.

Second is pinus sylvestris, aka. european red pine, scots/baltic/nordic/etc. pine. The usual density of this wood for structural work is 550kg/m3, but as it is also widely planted, the density range varies widely from 400-600kg/m3. It also makes good masts, just a bit heavier then spruce, even if adjusted for strength.

In Russia there are two other commercially important pines, pinus sibirica, aka. siberian pine/siberian cedar, and pinus koraiensis aka. korean pine, wich are both white pines (strobus family), weigh ~440kg/m3 and have mechanical properties similar to spruce.

Beside this, one can also find domestic douglas fir/oregon pine, but most mast quality wood is imported, larch (including imported siberian) that is considered to heavy for masts, and a whole crop of other pines wich have only local importance like the southern european pines, (brutia, halepensis, pinaster, nigra) and white pines like cembra and the american strobus.

Basicly all one needs to know in nothern Europe about mast wood is the colour, white/yellow is lighter, orange/red is heavier, then select the one with the thinner growth rings.

 

Rumars, many thanks for the precious information.

In France, when buying "Nordic" wood for spars or for strip plank, we applied the method you described in the last line of your post.
We used simply the color and density. So for choosing for example planed battens called 21x21 mm, which in real measure range from 20x20 to 23x23 we used the following method;
- Check of the dimensions using a gauge cut in a piece of strong plastic with a "gap" of 22 mm for example and at same time checking the color (light yellow) and the grain. The grain must be straight and vertical. That seems complicated, but in reality that goes pretty fast. So you get all the battens at the same dimension in quality better and clear (no knots allowed).
- The number of rings and the strength are correlated to the density. Generally, 8 to 9 rings by inch is a good cipher for white pines and spruces (around 6 to 7 for a 22 mm batten, but 5 to 6 is acceptable in a laminate) That you wanrt in the light side, which corresponds to a density of 430 to 450 kg/m3 or great advantage of the metric system 0.43 to 0.45 gr/cm3. A little calculation gives the expected weight of a batten for example: length 250 cm, side 22 mm or 2.2 cm, the volume is 250*2.2*2.2= 1210 cm3 and a weight of 1210*0.45= 544.5 gr.
That means that the battens of this dimension have to weight somewhere between 520 (density 0.430) and 550 gr (density 0.454). You can even define a range of densities to suit special desiderata. And that's pretty simple with a cheap kitchen scale. With some "training" it takes seconds to weight a vertical batten on a kitchen scale of 3 kg max (sensitivity around 5 gr) put on the floor. That goes pretty fast.
If you're very picky, you can even define a standard flexing under the stress of a weight, the batten being horizontal on sawhorses. Also, it's pretty fast with a simple "apparatus". That was used for the wood used for Finn masts, which have to flex like fishing poles.
With rough planks it's a bit more difficult, but experience allow choosing well and fast.

 

Thank you everyone!

 

You're welcome.

 

Ditto.