After a short hiatus in June due to a heavy workload with spar building partner, we took a couple days off to do a final big push in the workshop to cut all the staves for the hollow eight sided birdsmouth masts.

Each stave was 15mm by 32mm for the Caledonia yawl mast. my friends’ masts are a little bit smaller and his were 14mm by 29mm.

All the Sitka Spruce stock was excellent in the pieces we used to cut the staves. Unfortunately with 15mm width, could not get eight pieces from the one good 2×6 I’d reserved for the mast. I had to scarf together the eight piece from other stock that had some knots or other imperfections. Fortunately small diameter Sitka Spruce was easy to plane into the scarfs with the long jointer plane.

The next step was to set up the router table with the birdsmouth 45 degree router bit. Since we are routing 20′ long sections we set up a feather board on each side of the router and a fence on top as well to hold it in place. Such long skinny pieces have a lot of flexibility and wobble if they are not held down against the fence.

Once we had it all set up we made quick work of it and produced quite a bit of sawdust. Fortunately the woodshop had an excellent dust collection system.

The final product looks great. The final step is to cut the taper in each one so that the mast can have it’s appropriate taper.