Yard and Daggerboard work

Another weekend has come and gone allowing time for some high-quality wood butchery!

So that a start can be made on some of the hull panels I cleared some space in the front room and brought through two of the Plywood sheets (yes, I do have an very understanding and long-suffering wife) so that I can mark out one of the hull sides. A series of lines are drawn on the two sheets at 300mm intervals and on these lines marks are made to show the position of the top and bottom of the hull side. The designers method of hammering pins into these points and then bending the faring batten around the pins was a really good way of ensuring a fare shape was drawn onto the ply, it was also really clear where a nail was not quite in the correct position.

Drawing the side panels

The yard had already been planed down to a taper but was still square in section, in order to make it round I needed to make a spar-gauge, this is a tool that helps mark-up a square spar so that it can be planned to an almost round shape. In true wood-butcher style I made one with the best “trial-and-error” method and the Mark 6 spar-gauge worked reasonably well and allowed me to plane down the yard to an tapered octagon shape. The yard was then planed to a 16 sided shape freehand and we have ended up with an almost round spar, I just need some long lengths of sandpaper to round off the final edges. The yard is surprisingly bendy, it is designed to be bendy but I need to measure this flexibility against some existing flex data recorded on the designers website. The sail will be cut to reflect the amount of flex in the yard but I don’t want to to be so flexible that the lightest of gusts means that I lose sail shape. If there is too much flex I may have to think again about the use of carbon fibre tube for the spars (but using the wooden mast).

Spar Gauge

The final job of the day was to continue with the dagger board, the blank had been laminated but this needed cleaning up and thicknessing to 22mm. As I don’t have a thicknessing machine this was done with my latest ebay purchase, a large No6 bench plane. The cedar is relatively soft and easy to plane but the oak that was chosen for the leading and trailing edge of the dagger board was very hard work even with a freshly sharpened blade. While playing games of hide-and-seek with my eldest son I slowly get the blank pleasingly flat and to the required thickness. The shape of the dagger board was then drawn on the blank and cut out with a jigsaw. Next I need to make up the designers foil profile template so that a sweet profile can be planned into the dagger board.




Daggerboard with mast and yard behind