Building a Beg-Meil

(Don’t let the one day between posts fool you.

It’s been about a month since my last post, but I haven’t been idle as we enter the dog days of summer.

The next step in the workbench project was to take the 20 boards I’d bought for the benchtop into the Tool Library shop and mill them to size.

When people ask how the boat building is going, I often say something like “slowly.”

I’ve been actively working on this project for just over a year.

The solution to my varnish woes turned out to be mostly about putting on very light coats of varnish.

After applying a bunch of Deks Olje D1 – a saturating wood oil – I started in on the first of many coats of Deks Olje D2.

After lackluster results with my initial attempt at making gaff jaws, I set out on “take two” aiming to avoid the issues I had with the previous attempt: I’d make the boards thinner, and thus easier to bend.

Redo Travel, illness (my first bout of covid!)

The plans show two options for connecting the boom to the mast.

No, not this guy.

Preface: I’m by no means an expert, and you should absolutely do your own research before deciding what safety equipement to use.

Last summer when I bought some Sitka spruce for the spars, I’d hoped it’d be enough for the bowsprit, boom, gaff, and mast.

You may be wondering what a “reef comb” is.

The folks over at Lost Art Press have apparently been offering a reprint of the 1914 Stanley Tools (“Stanley Rule & Level Company”) catalog.

The plans call for four cleats on the boom, four on the gaff, and one on the bowsprit.

I’ve been slowly making headway on a number of projects to build the bits and bobs that get stuck onto the spars: cleats, jaws, and reef combs.

“The only motivation for building a boat is because you want to do it.

The gaff jaws need to be bent (foreshadowing for an upcoming post!).

With a (mostly) functional spar lathe and temperatures that climbed back up into the more-reasonable 40s (before Christmas it’d been in the teens and 20s…a bit too low even with a garage space heater!)

When last I wrote about about my attempt to make a spar lathe, I’d thought I’d solved the hardest part.

In an earlier post, I’d mentioned that I was thinking about building a spar lathe.

There are a number of bits and bobs that need to be attached to the boom, gaff, bowsprit, and mast.

With the boom roughed to size, I then took it from four sides to eight, and then sixteen.

The nice thing about working on the boom is that I think most folks who have even a passing familiarity with a sailboat know what a boom is.

Take the gaff from eight sides to sixteen was one of the easier steps in the process, mostly because there just isn’t that much wood to remove.

With the lines drawn using the spar gauge, it was time to knock off the corners and go from a four-sided stick to an eight-sided stick.

As I mentioned earlier, when searching for the right boat to build, I’d compiled a list of about 30 different plans.

To go from a square-sectioned spar to a round spar, one first needs to go from four sides to eight sides, and then to 16 sides.

For now, at least, I’m using hand planes to shape the spars.

With the help of my neighbor (and tool library shop steward) Joel, I hauled a couple of ~14 foot Sitka spruce boards to the tool library with the intention of turning them into smaller pieces of Sitka spruce that could then be glued up into blanks for the…

I decided to start with the bowsprit (aka the pointy bit at the front of the boat).

I’m going to start by making the spars – the mast, gaff, boom, and bowsprit.

“Yak Shaving” is a term that comes out of the technology space (where I spend my days).

As I start out, I wouldn’t consider myself much of a woodworker.

Deciding to build a boat is a sign you’re planting your feet firmly in the “journey” camp, not the “destination” camp.

I decided I wanted to build a boat.