Day 2, Row/sail canoe, version 2. Build time: 7hrs.
Woke up in the middle of the night and realized I’d forgotten to do a glue up on the mast, did that, went back to sleep.
Realized this morning that I keep ordering sail bits and bobbles I already own so I decided to get OCD for a while organizing everything. So satisfying.
Building the spars first this time so they’ll be done varnishing by the time I finish the boat. Did my usual dance of finishing spars, changing my mind and working them again. It’s inefficient. In this case I just couldn’t get behind a 2 1/2 inch solid spruce mast for a 56 square foot sail. Ultimately decided to go with Ian Oughtreds formula giving me a 2 3/16 mast. Still a bit beefy tapered square with rounded corners. Round spars aren’t any harder to make I just really like square/rounded for stepping and hardware mounting reasons. Also easier to turn the spars into other things if you change your mind. Ironically I completely planed off last nights lamination.
Finally retreated from the wind/snow on my porch (my shop) and headed inside to work the oars I built last week down to a nice feeling flex. I’m trying an experiment of mounting a 3 foot tiller extension to each oar so I can hike out and still steer. It will hinge near the handle and the other end will drop into a clip mounted on the oar. This is another thing you could only do with a pinned oar. Excited to see if it works.
My Le Tonkinois came in the mail. I like that it comes in 2.5 L, a perfect amount for a project like this. Trial run tonight in the basement.
___
This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
