Construction Journal

Here's the finished first knee clamped in place. I haven't glued it up yet, but I have already shaped it and fit it for gluing. I'll glue it in when I laminate the other knee, which will be after the wet wood dries, most likely tomorrow night. I tend to glue up more than one thing at a time to avoid wasting epoxy, but that strategy has been less than spetacularly successful. Maybe one of these days I'll snap a photo of all the mixing bowl-shaped hunks of glue I have laying around and post it to this site.

It's been so long since I updated this site, that I know most of you have just stopped coming back to check up on me. Well, things have certainly been bumpy for me, so I've not had the energy or the inclination to do much boat work or updates on this site, but that's changing and I'm back at it. I hope that those of you with the patience to wait me out will be happy with my continuing on with the long, painful sojourn that building this boat has become.

So now it's time to make some spars. The Acorn calls for three of them. A mast of nearly ten feet in height, a boom of about six feet, and a yard of eight feet. The sail will be a balanced lug rig. The hard part of this, as it turned out, was in selecting the lumber. I have to confess that I waffled back and forth, with words like. "Hell with it, use a closet pole, no, build it yourself, no, use the closet pole, you fool." In the end I decided to build it myself, since I've built everything else. So, to the plans.

Oughtreid lays out the dimensions of the spars in the plans by dividing the lengths into quarters (then lengths of which you have to figure out, along with the fact that they are indeed quarters) and he marks the width of the spar at that point. When you transfer these widths to the surface of a length of lumber, they describe the taper of the piece.

So after gluing up the boom and yard, I had blocks of wood upon which to place my marks. I then bent a batten clamped along the points and drew out the curves on each edge of the face. Then I did some precision band-saw word with my circular table saw and smoothed things out some before I repeadt the process on the adjoining face to complete the taper on all four sides.

Now this sounds a lot more complicated than it really was, once I figured out a couple of things. In the end I referred to Greg Stossel's Small Boat Building, a really great text for filling those cavernous gaps in my understanding.

Here I'm rounding the yard with a nice block plane. You know, this plane has been the work horse of this project. I finally bought a larger jack plane feeling that somehow I really should be using a larger plane for those bigger jobs, and as soon as I get the iron in it in shape, I'm sure it will be great, but I find myself reaching for that cheap little Stanely block plane, purchased only because it was the last plane left at Home Depot and it looked kind of lonely. This is the plane I learned to sharpen irons with, and it's finally in a shape to where I use it and use it, and when it needs sharpening, I simply re-invigorate the micro bevel and it's good to go again. It's been a great tool, but I do want to get the newer one in shape. This one too is a forlorn Home Depot special, and I have high hopes for it.

I really should start another web site about coaxing cheap, junky tools into shape. I have the cheapest of tools. My circular saw was purchased in Bermuda in 1976 for five dollars in a pawn shop, and it looked like crap then. But it's not given me an excuse to junk it yet, and it will probably outlive me. I should have all these cheap, crappy tools put into my coffin with me. They must have some slop carpentry work that needs done in heaven, don't you think?

Next is the mast, and I'm going to show lots more detail on how I go about making a spar with that project. Note that I said how I go about it, not necessarily the right way to go about it. The first two spars were really just practice for the main event.

And here they are. After I finished, I called my son in to check them out, and I said, "Look Sean, I made closet poles." And we high-fived.