Week 15 - Coachroofbeams / Spars

Actually we are since quite a while working on the spars parallel to the work on the boat.
The process to get nice rounded wood is pretty much comparable to the way of fashioning the looms of the oars about which I've been reporting earlier.
So we started by glueing the boards with mirrored grain as on the photo.
In the case of mast and spars we only use epoxy and for those parts which have to get extended we use spar scarf ratios of 1 : 12 (Lloyd's rule).

All mast and spars are made of douglas fyr which is heavier but more rigid than sitka spruce that we used on the oars and indeed also could have been used for the rigging. However because of Glóeys in general very solid construction as a seaworthy pocketcruiser I decided for douglas fyr.

There are a lot of bronze fittings on the rigging which have to be trimmed and fitted to the mast, spars and stem. On the picture below we see to the left the mainboomendcap with an eye for the toppinglift, in the middle the boomendfitting towards the gooseneck and on the right side the custommade gammoniron which will be sitting on the stem and support the bowsprit.

On the boat we started making templates for the coachroofbeams. The plan was to create them as laminates of 1/8" sapele veneers bent over individual formers. And to fashion these formers we used the 9mm templateplywood as a corematerial to which we glued cheeks in 18mm ply.

The role of the 2" holes along the formercurves is to allow centric clamping. It looks like a lavish effort to build separate formers for each beam but it isn't at all. We just used a copy routerbit with a bearing and that makes the job very effective.

But before beeing able to fit the laminated beams to the coachroof we had to glue the beamshelfs in.
They are made of three 1/4 " sapele mahogani veneers on each side which made it easy to bend them to the endposition.

The tight clampingspacing secured a nice even contact and finally after the epoxy had cured we trimmed the overhight coamings and the beamshelf to their correct bevels (changing bevel along the roofedge) and fitted the laminated beams.