Rudder design #3, and shaping the mast.

A little more thought into the rudder today.  Since Mr. Storer is concerned about the tiller splitting from the forces, he would like to see a thru-bolt through the tiller, into the spacer block.  So I thought, how about a removable thru-bolt that could be tightened with a butterfly nut, or something like that?  The adjusted illustration is below:

In other much more exciting news... I started shaping the mast!

This is awesome, because I'd love to see my mast.  Hmmm Hmmm mast.  Powerhouse piece of lumber that gets me from A to B for free.

I am building the Hollow Square Mast option, of three that come with the boat (Solid Round, Birdsmouth are the other two).

First off, I must loft the dimensions of the narrow staves onto my lumber.  One piece of lumber has a slight curve in it.  I didn't think too much of it, and sawed 1cm off the edge of the lumber.  Big mistake!  The curve was more than I anticipated, and I didn't think I had the room to actually loft a narrow stave!  I was seriously pissed, pounded my broom on the floor, and let out of primordial yell.  A screwed piece of lumber means 25 bucks in the hole, a trip to the lumberyard, hoping to find a piece long enough, travel up north to the planer, using the planer, then back home.  It's a process!

Mr. Storer has a fabulous option in his plans for curved pieces of lumber however, "The String Down the Middle" method.  So, I marke the middle of each end and attached a string between them, and got this:

As you can probably tell, the string is way near the edge, too close to loft the mast using this as the backbone.  I had to adjust the string to get me the most amount of wood:

Then, I lofted it on, hoping for the best... and it worked!  I was just able to get it on with a little left over.  It made for a strange visual illusion, with straight lines cutting every-so-slightly diagonally across the grain, but it worked well, and for that, I was happy.  As you can see, the top of the mast is very close to the edge:

With the mast material propped up between two table extenders and my clamp table (50lb bag o' seed keeps it from moving) I planned the staves down to the lines.

 

I then matched them up and got it as close as possible.  Since we're making a box here, it's very important to keep things square, equal to each other, and the same size.  This is a precision operation.  Once the staves are glued in their ladder format, the wider boards can be glued right on, and then trimmed, making life a little easier on that front, at least.  Sweet.  Mast.