Mast | Making The Staves

The mast is a tapered hollow box consisting of four long staves of Douglas Fir for the side, front and rear pieces.

So the first step is to make the staves from two or three pieces scarfed together to create the 16' lengths.

When I made the first stave I posted that because the scarfs had been cut edge-to-edge rather face-to-face the joints are very long and need a lot of clamps when gluing up.

Seven scarf joints were required and I only possess 15 G cramps, so it took some time to make all four staves.

The process is simple. First we need to clean up the sawn joints with the block plane, like this.

Then the joints were glued and clamped and left to cure for a couple of days, as here.

The joints turned out pretty tight and will look good when varnished.

The next task is to fashion the tapered pieces for the mast itself.