Thanks to Board Member Peter Marshall for main mast updates:
Well, our crew of fine craftsmen are wasting no time in creating piles of sawdust on the shop floor! Already this week, planks for the fore and aft sides of the mast have been laid out on the spar bench, scarfs located and cut.
In order to cut scarfs in these giant planks, first the scarf is laid out with pencil lines, then the big six inch Makita power planer comes along and hogs out the majority of wood where it isn’t needed. Although the Makita is an excellent machine guided by skilled hands, when it comes to sneaking down to the final pencil lines, it just won’t do. At this point only a sharp old school hand plane, talent and a delicate touch can do the trick. In one photo, Thomas shows how his hand plane spits out those sweet sweet curls of spruce shavings. Way to go Thomas! You might notice in another photo, that protection has been applied to one of the finished scarfs. It will be some time before glue up and to damage any part of the scarf could be detrimental. Good thinking crew!
Now life is never without its challenges and that seems to suit the MARTHA crew just fine, in fact I’d say that it has been proven over the last couple of decades that the crew are custom tailored for great challenges. The challenge d’jour is how to combat the beastly twist that has reared its ugly head in each of the timbers. Before you march after us with spikes and picks, no the lumber was not stored and dried improperly, we just found a tree with as much spirit and spunk as MARTHA herself. Never fear though, a solution has been found! If you look closely at the planks laid on the bench you will see small wedges and large clamps. The idea is to induce some counter twist to start off with and eventually combine it with opposing forces in the glue up stage and clever layout in the finished spar.
In other exciting spar related news, we have drifted over the halfway mark in fundraising for the new mast, so if you have donated, we can’t thank you enough. If you have not had a chance to donate yet, please take this opportunity to give and support MARTHA. I know we can fully fund this mast project together.