Birdsmouth Past Mast - Day 6

Birdsmouth Mast - weighed a hefty 45lbs this morning - 7 hours later plus lots of elbow grease, it's now 34lbs!  That's 11lbs worth of shavings which were created by hand by your truly...Today the planing was more successful, accompanied by several trips to the Japanese Waterstones. The plane worked effortlessly taking of shavings some of which...

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Birdsmouth Mast - Day 5

This morning I unwrapped the mast from its overnight coat and was pleased to see that the epoxy was well set.  So I enthusiastically set about planing back the mast  - first removing the epoxy coat from the wood was quite a struggle - even my trusty farriers file was baulking at the challenge.  I alternated between it an an old Anant...

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Birdsmouth Mast Day 4

This morning, I cleaned off the epoxy from the inner plugs using my trusty farriers file....easy!The plug for the bottom of the mast seemed a little oversized and I had to plane it quite a bit to get a good fit, especially at the base of the mast where it is tapered down from the gooseneck.  Brian made up the solid plug or the top of the mast...

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Birdsmouth - Day3

I read where someone created their birdsmouth mast in 5 or so hours...well this is Day 3 and still not finished, but steady progress nonetheless.Rather than fiddling around with taper jigs for the tablesaw, I took advantage of the clement weather and fired up my Quansheng Foreplane and tapered the staves by hand.  In fact it was quite a fast operation...

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Birdsmouth Mast - Day 2

Today I managed to clean down the scarf joints armed with my Farriers File - Thanks Andrew for the hint!  The scarf joints turned out well and the staves dead straight, thanks to the aluminium ladder which I rigged up hastily as a bench.The duck tape worked fine to hold the scarf joint together while the epoxy set over night.  Additionally...

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Birdsmouth Mast

I decided to attempt making a birdsmouth mast which initially I viewed as beyond my capabilities but on researching further and reading extensively, I believed the hype that in fact it is quite easy and doable for the home amateur builder.Using John O'Neil's excellent article in Duckworks Birdsmouth in Practice  I set up a spreadsheet calculating...

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Deck Beams & Stringers

A few months break from building came to an abrupt end when last week, I spent some quality time on fitting out the deck beams and stringers.  This was challenging for me but ultimately quite satisfying as there were three joints for each beam to align.  The centre stringer is reproduced from the full sized plan, so not much to go wrong there...it...

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