Birds Mouth wooden masts and spars,revisited

Wood for boat masts? with global materials prices on any product made using energy for its production,this may be a good question to both ask and answer,plastics and any sort of alloy has reached dizzy prices world wide,so the cost to carbon and alloy spars must rise too.Wood,less so but for sure some will find ways of increasing its cost,shipping surcharges come to mind?

What kind of masts and spars can we build with wood? well anything from an Optimist to an eighty foot schooner,all have had wooden masts in the past,some still do of course.We can have solid masts,they will be too heavy for most applications,we can also have hollow ones which will sort out the weight issue to a large extent,they can be round or rectangular,it depends the end use and how the sails are bent on?

Round masts will normally see the sails attatched with rope or wood hoops,smaller designs may just have a luff tube sewn into the sail,that then slips over the round spar mast.Rectangular masts can either have an alloy extrusion bolt rope or sail slide track screwed on to the back of the mast,or we can pre machine the mast to have an internal groove to take either a bolt rope or slides.

We should be making one of these next week for an Argie 15 www.dixdesign.com the original round alloy pole and the alloy bolt rope track is no longer available,so we make a mast and boom kit to a special order,we have done quite a number so far.This set will be made from four pieces of clear oregon pine,in this case with a scarph to allow the sections to fit in an air plane flting cargo to Kenya,normally we use our stock 5.8mtr lengths to make in one go,no bothers with a scarph joint by the way,they can look quite good too.The picture shows some sections of an eight segment mast,in this case round but by making some of the staves a little wider,we can easily make the same spar into a rectangle.

For my full and published story on this subject,check out Duckworks Magazine,a great on line boating store we work with,try this link:

www.duckworksmagazine.com/06/howto/birdsmouth/index.htm


Roy