Keith has been worried that our main mast will fit; we’ve found out that we actually have a few inches to spare. It’s still not much…
Here we show Herb enjoying his craft, perhaps too much. A happy splicer is a happy rigger!
We have 48′ of brass deck railing to shape. Bill believes he can accomplish this using the table saw and has been busy trying out a number of creative jigs and fixtures.
Lastly, we have Keith making sure that the mast collar will fit over the mast truss chainplate.
We spent this last Saturday working on the dry fittings for the boom. After some diligent work that left our eyes sore, we managed to get some accurate measurements and center all the pieces fairly well.
In other news, here’s a nice image of how the spreader is looking right now on the mast.
Keith put final touches on our spreaders; it really changes the whole boat! We can but imagine how large these were in real life.
Tim and Keith worked on tapping holes for eyes to go on the mast and we’ve screwed them in place temporarily to get everything aligned.
Soon we’ll remove them and send them to a nickel plating company along with some other fittings. Tim also finished up some leftover woodworking tasks while I was grinding and polishing new boom fittings that Mike delivered from our casting company.
Meanwhile, Laura, our rigger, has been doing a great job wire splicing as per usual, and even showed us how to make some tacks from wire grommets!
Keith made a jig to hold the spreaders in perfect alignment while the spreader socket pins set in high-tech glues. The bowsprit is starting to look awesome. You can really get the feeling of how massive it was!
Here are some of Mike’s delivery of castings; ready for final filing, polishing, and nickel plating.
Finally, here are the ladder rungs which will go on the top section of the mast.
Here is the mast jig that Keith built. When we’re ready with the mast and standing rigging, we’ll put the mast into it and then measure all the standing rigging at deck level to make sure we have the correct lengths.
This way, all the main shrouds will be at similar levels when attached to turnbuckles, and the forestay at measured length will ensure the correct 1.5 degree rake aft.
In the meantime, we’ve been practicing our attachment process and with our high-test strain meter calculating how much strain the fittings will hold. Not quite the destructive testing NGH did, but we hope it’ll do! Rigging hanging from the stump mast is ready to go: all seized in eyes to place at the top of the mast.
PS: The mat is for Lucy, our shy shop dog.
The RELIANCE Project 