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| My primitive vice holding the spar in position |
Today I worked one of the spars and the mast. Since I don't have a worktable with a vice, my first task was to dream up a clamping system using my saw horses. My solution was to attach a pair of wooden blocks spaced 2 3/4" apart to each saw horse. As you can see in the picture above, these blocks allow me to use shims to "clamp" things like the mast and spars securely in position. Using my circular saw, my rasp, my block plane, and my orbital sander, I was able to complete one spar. . . . Well, it's not really complete since I only sanded it with 80-grit sandpaper. I still need to use some fiberglass glue to repair one small flaw in the scarf joint and then I can finish the job with 100-grit and 220-grit sandpaper.
After that I clamped the 2 1/2 x 2 1/2 mast blank onto my makeshift work table and generated a huge dust storm as I trimmed it down to the rough shape of the mast. At one point the circular saw must have twisted a little on its shoe and a trimmed a bit too deeply, but fortunately I saved the "shim" from that section of the mast so that I can glue on the required sliver of wood. My error wasn't bad enough to affect the structural strength of the mast, but it would be a cosmetic blotch without a bit of repair.
A person with a power plane and a router could probably crack out the spars and mast in relatively short order. I don't want to fill up the garage with more tools and I also find it fairly satisfying to work with basic hand tools as much as possible in building a boat that will move across the water by equally archaic means.
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