Friday, September 4, 2015

Main Mast Glue-Up

Thursday's glue-up of the main mast went very well.

I mixed epoxy while Andy and Dave coated the notches. We applied epoxy to three staves, nested them and one taped stave in the jig, epoxied the next three staves, added those to the jig and capped the assembly with the second taped stave. Then we clamped the assembly using 24 hose clamps, checked for tight seams and epoxy squeeze out and made sure the assembly was straight.

Once it was all clamped and straight we set about filling small gaps with epoxy and pretty much admiring our work!

Today, we removed the clamps and pulled the two halves apart and began on the plugs for the mast. Laminated blanks for the plugs at/near the bottom of the mast were glued up and will be re-sawn to size tomorrow. Blanks for the smaller plugs at/near the top of the mast were re-sawn to size today. All of the plugs will be cut to an octagon cross-section to fit inside the mast.

Lessons learned from this mast assembly:
  • Mixing and applying epoxy went better with three people than with two
  • Hose clamps can be linked together to make larger clamps
  • Larger spars are easier to assemble than smaller ones (within limits, I am sure)
  • Inexpensive, brown packing tape is easier to work with than the Dow specialty tape (used to cover seams of blue-board insulation) we used for the mizzen (now yard) assembly

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