Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 16

This was a fairly long day of serious wood shaping. In the morning I worked on the mast again. Yesterday I had gotten it fairly smooth, but the edges were all sharp. Today I put about a 3/8" round over on each of the four edges. This required getting my plane sharp enough to do the bulk of the work. Then I used the orbital sander to smooth everything out nicely. I'll still need to sand it with medium and fine grit sandpaper before finishing it with a few coats of varnish. As you'll see in the picture below, the top 1 1/2" of the mast does not have chamfered edges and is squared off. This area needs to be a bit larger (and stronger) because I'll be drilling a hole in it for the halyard.

After lunch I took all of the clamps off the rails. Then I used a saber saw to cut the rails at the bow and create a rough rounding. Similarly I used my Japanese saw to slice off the rails at the stern and again created a rough rounding with the saber saw.

Now it was time to start making the rails look pretty. The belt sander created its usual dust storm but gradually smoothed off the tops of the rails and removed the occasional patches of fiberglass glue. Rounding the sharp edge on the tops of the rails took a good bit of work. First I put a chamfer on the edges with the plane. Then I used the belt sander to round them a little. And finally I finished up by hand with a wood rasp. The rails now only need a bit of finish work with the orbital sander before they can be coated with fiberglass.

The almost-finished top of the mast
resting on the almost-finished rails

The other end of the mast

Close-up of a section of the rail