Fitting Out | Bowsprit & Bobstay

It was soon time to start thinking about fitting out the spars, and I accordingly sought out the very first sheet of the plans, which the build manual tells us gives exact locations for the hardware.

It's half right, as usual. Some fittings are accurately located, and some we will have to guesstimate.

Anyway, I pinned the plan for the spars on the wall, and started to figure out what goes where.

Here it is, up on the wall.

That feels like progress!

The bowsprit looked quite straightforward, so I started with that. Dimensions for the pad eyes are given, and I marked them out on the spar using masking tape. Like this.

Next came drilling the holes for the machine screws. They are through spar fastenings, so have to be accurately drilled.

Here is the pillar drill, set up for this exercise.

It is very important that the bowsprit is level on the drill table both lengthways and sideways to get perpendicular drill holes, so using a spirit level is essential.

Here the holes are being drilled.

I test fitted the pad eyes using the stainless machine screws and plain steel washers and nuts - the final installation will be made with stainless locknuts which are not reusable.

A test fit of the bowsprit had earlier revealed that the bow eye was ever so slightly out of place. Either that or the bobstay supplied in the sailing hardware package was a tiny bit too short.

Either way, it would have been a miracle if the bobstay fitted perfectly. I hadn't even realised that it was included in the sailing hardware pack until I opened it up and was expecting to make my own, so length would not have been a problem.

Anyway ... the problem was easily resolved by moving the bobstay pad eye backwards a fraction, by turning it around.

This is the bowsprit with its bobstay in place.

And here you can see how I have reversed the lower pad eye for the bobstay, so it through bolts to the jib pad eye only at one end instead of both.

The shackle supplied for the bobstay looked a bit flimsy to me, so I substituted it for a much more substantial one. Here is the bow eye, shackle and bobstay.

That doesn't look as if it's likely to fail any time soon!

We are definitely getting there ...