Shaping A New Mast for Christeen
During this winter overhaul, Christeen, our 138-year-old, double gaff-rigged Oyster Sloop, was due for a new mast! Shaping a new mast for Chirsteen requires a lot of expertise and dedication to do the job! So, we called up Shipwright Josh Herman, a well-known traditional wooden boat builder how has been taking care of the Christeen for the past 11 years. With the help of our dedicated volunteers, Josh shaped the 45-foot mast from over 200 linear feet of Douglas Fir. Learn all about the process in this week’s blog & mini-documentary.
During this winter overhaul, Christeen, our 138-year-old, double gaff-rigged Oyster Sloop, was due for a new mast! Shaping a new mast for Chirsteen is a labor of love as she was first built in 1883 and requires a lot of expertise and dedication to doing the job! So, we called up just the man for the job!
Josh Herman is a traditional wooden boat builder who has been building and restoring traditional wooden boats for twenty years. His background in woodworking goes farther back as the ten years before that he was a carpenter. Josh has been working on and taking care of Christeen's repairs for us for the past eleven years.
In February, Josh, with the help of our volunteers, started the process of creating a new mast for Christeen to make sure she's always in tip-top shape. They first began by purchasing 200 linear feet of 3inch thick, 12-inch-wide vertical grain Douglas Fir. Josh and his team purchased 20-foot boards and cut scarf joints in between the panels in order to join them together to build up the four laminates to the 45ft length that the mast needs to be. After cutting the scarf joints and checking the angles to make sure they fit together, Josh and the volunteers started to glue them together with epoxy. After gluing the first two layers, they pressed them together with clamps overnight to make sure it holds together nice and tight.
The next day they glued together the last two layers and attached the scarf joints together. Once the layer is attached, they must work quickly with the clamps to bind the wood for the mast to be strong. Once the boards were all glued together, the volunteers and Josh ended up with a 12-inch sq by 45ft length block of wood.
The next step was to clean up the glue and shape the mast. First, the volunteers and Josh cleaned up the excess glue and wood on the mast's sides and top and bottom. Then they took the circular saw and cut the longitudinal taper from the bottom of the mast to the top of both sides, then rotated it 90 degrees and repeated the process, so they ended up with a long 12-inch height 45ft block of wood. From there, they used the circular saw once again and cut off the corners to make the block 8 sided, then went back in to make it 16 sided and cut the corners once last time to make the block 32 sided. In between each cut, Josh went in and fixed up the sides of the block with multiple different planes to smooth the wood and make sure everything was balanced and equal.
From that point, Josh planed the mast with a series of different radius spar planes. A spar plane is a wooden hand plane with a curvature that has the diameter of the surface you're trying to create cut into the soul of the plane. The bottom of the mast is 12 inches in diameter, so he started with a 12-inch spar plane. Josh switched to a 10-inch diameter spar plane in the middle, and at the top where the mast gets skinner, he used an 8-inch spar plane.
Once the mast went from a 45 ft octagon to a smooth round circular mast, the next step was hand planning the mast to perfection. Josh and the volunteers started coating the mast in linseed oil and paint thinner. Next, they fit all the original hardware that was on the old mast onto the new one. Once all the fittings are done, they will put the mast back in the boat and take care of the last couple of steps. They'll step the mast and then coat it in more linseed oil and Vaseline, the mast will be painted, and all the standing rigging will be coated with tar.
Once the mast sets, Christeen will be sailed to her mooring at our facility, where she'll get to have another great summer at The WaterFront Center.
Through the effort of volunteers, Christeen was initially restored for The WaterFront Center. We need a growing community of dedicated and energetic volunteers to continuously maintain Christeen to shepherd students and passengers on education programs in Oyster Bay. If you or anyone you know would be interested in volunteering, please sign up on our page: https://www.sailchristeen.org/volunteering.
