Spars
Making the Spars |
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| The mast was glued from two
pieces of spruce. The spruce was clamped to an aluminium ladder as the floor of the garage is not level. The spruce was clamped horizontally and vertically - horizontally to press the two pieces of wood together and vertically to stop them sliding one above the other. Plastic tape was wrapped around the rungs of the ladder so the spruce would not stick to it. |
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| The taper was then marked on
the mast, cut with a bandsaw and then planed. A spar gauge was made to mark the mast so it could accurately be planed from 4 sided to 8 sided. |
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| The mast was planed so it was
8 sided. This creates a lot of shavings. I find planing to 16 sided by eye hard to do accurately so another spar gauge was made to mark the mast for 16 sides. |
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| Finally the mast was sanded
from 16 sided to round using a length of 80 grit sanding belt. The mast is now redundant as all this sanding and planing will leave you fit enough to row the boat anywhere you could wish to go. |
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| The boom and gaff were made
by following the same steps for the mast. If you are making wooden gaff
or boom jaws it may be easier to leave one end of the spar square and
plane/sand the rest of the spar round. Gaff jaws were made from ash and bolted through the gaff. Leather was glued to the jaws to protect the mast. |
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| I made two sets of gaff jaws, the first set were certainly strong enough but looked far to chunky and spoilt the appearance of the spars. |  |