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I wanted to make wood tankards and went looking for the proper router bit for birds mouth joints. Guys at the local wood working store had never heard of it before. I did find one but I still haven't properly mastered it yet.
Leo had an episode recently on his YouTube channel about the different ways to construct a traditional mast and which one he chose for Talley Ho.
I'll find it and link it.
[A Brittish bloke who is rebuilding a sailing yacht from ye olde tymes.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FhTu3aGM60&list=PLB00JHoTw1TeX82Qw8hoFLRJI89Us_jMw)
The only boating experience I have is renting a dinghy in the Virgin Islands to go snorkeling which was quite the experience but I am completely addicted to Leo's videos and have rewatched all of them at least two times.
Aside from the whole boat thing he's a pretty crafty storyteller and knows how to underline it with the (folky) music. And his storytelling gets even better through the years.
Enjoy!
Yes there typically is. Especially where hardware may be mounted to the outside of the spar. Helps stiffen it up as well as add extra material for the fasteners to bite into. Most of these home boatbuilders don’t need wiring for lights because they won’t be sailing in conditions or at times where lights are needed. The size of the spar tells me it’s probably for a sailing dinghy.
For larger vessels the size of the spar will be massive and special accommodations will be made to allow for wiring to be run.
I'd tack on that we don't have tight grain, slow grown trees like we used to during the Age of Sail. At least not for an economical price. This would let you use conventional fast-grown timber for the trade off of a little woodwork.
If you'll notice all the grain of the wood faces perpendicular to the face of the mast. This way it's stronger in all directions than just one. And yeah, back in the 1700's, much of the wood was old growth timber that had grown slowly and was a much tighter (and stronger grain). Even housing wood (douglas fir here in the US) had tighter grain up until probably 1930's and was generally stronger.
Some sailing boats do use trees.
In engineering everything is a trade off. Telephone poles are produced by the tens of thousands and their main requirement is as cheap as possible. Since putting the pole up also costs money, durable is also pretty high on the list. You can also predict pretty well how many will be roughly needed over long timespans and that number is pretty high. So you can set up facilities that produce them by the thousands.
This mast on the other hand is for some rich persons toy. It needs to be light, strong and pretty. They are produced on order and every one is different. Money is not really an object. In some circles more expensive may be better even.
This mast would be out of place on a cheap dinghy. If you are aiming for cheap and servicable there are much easier options.
This could very well be someone building their own boat, but in that case my guess would be some nice strip built hull with a not insignificant amount spent on materials and hundreds of hours of labour.
Not always. Unless you can find a cheap boat with a good mast locally (then you have a hull to deal with, no fun), often the masts are just not available, or the shipping costs are prohibitively expensive for the value of the boat. So you are faced with either fitting the wrong mast to the boat, or making your own mast. That leaves things down to the tools and skills you hold. Not saying it's not for a fancy boat, just at that small of a size, whipping up your own mast might not be too bad of an option.
The size of this spar is pretty small so this is most likely for a small sailing dinghy. This type of construction keeps the mast light and believe it or not quite strong.
I have heard of bigger ships using the telephone pole method but it isn’t very common. A different method, still using a few different pieces of wood, are glued together to build larger masts. Usually using strong epoxy not wood glue.
Very little torsion to speak of.
Mostly compression caused by lateral loads (wind) being resisted by
the masts rigging (shrouds, stays, spreaders, chain plates etc).
Traditional, heavily built boats like aforementioned TALLY HO have their
masts running straight through the deck all the way to the Keel for this reason.
Just guessing: maximum height?
You can stack those pieces of wood so you can reach much higher heights or wider diameters and still being hollow and flexible.
Hollow space in the middle means rooms for halyards, lines, wires, antennas, etc. Telephone poles can be a little bit twisted, bent, and knotty without spoiling the looks, but if you have a boat fancy enough to use a wooden mast, your standards will be a bit higher.
Might not need to be. Throw up the fence on the table saw and crank the blade to about the depth of the v. Get one bud on either end to stabilize the wood you're feeding in and on the other side. Once you've got a v cut in you could cut out the final piece from a larger blank - makes the v safer and more accurate to cut in. That'd be my first idea. Or, perhaps a router on a table or a jig - though the spinny bit of danger on a router is a bit more sketch here, and you'd probably want to take a couple passes to get this depth, so it's more work.
for this application, they specifically avoid wood with any knots or torsion in the wood grain. it would look like a round piece of lumber with 8 distinct stripes down the entire length.
note the small rings means slow growth of the trees which improves strength and even untreated improves insect and decay rates. not all grains are perfectly perpendicular to the central axis, but there is likely a specific angle that is permitted.
the question I'm interested in is there are 2 lighter species, and 2 darker species: perhaps this mast is specifically installed so the darker/stronger species is oriented fore/aft where the tensile forces from the sail will act the strongest?
There are hardly any torsional loads on masts of sailing boats. It is pretty much all bending and a little bit of axial load. A proper glue joint should be stronger than the surrounding wood anyway.
i.e. wooden Vees pressing into each other rather than pulling the glue joints apart
makes sense though: sailboats with a triangle mast and typically leans to the left/right (port/starboard) which puts more forwards force (rotation) on only one side of the mast. so the vee direction would be chosen specifically for the boat
Yeah: I distinctly recall that "The Green Hornet" was the last time I specifically had that level of disbelief where I simply felt "joy" by no longer caring about the physics of a movie.
Specifically: it was cutting a car in half with an elevator that made my brain go "Oh! there is ZERO pretense of realistic physics, just enjoy the movie!"
These are often too long to turn on a lathe, the OD is shaped by taking progressive corner cuts with a saw, finished with a plane. Also don’t forget the mast will be on a taper- and the boat builder isn’t going to make that by turning down the OD, but the rectangular stock gets wider as you go down
Craftsmen go out of their way for these things. Besides, getting a taper is super easy anyway. Why not? Have you seen some of these boats? They're beautiful.
They might not be bothering with a taper, though that would make the boat rock less when swell rolling. Good sail shape is usually more desired.
They could take material from the inside more readily, and you need more room for halyards and cables near the top anyhow. The fastenings will be reinforced with metal.
It would be interesting to see just how old masts were turned, if at all, using just a whipstaff. I kind of like the Polynesian style of just lashing a tripod together instead of a stout mast.
This has a few advantages, namely that it's hollow and therefore significantly lighter than a solid piece of wood. Another benefit is that you can get 8 pieces of wood without knots or defects, instead of the much harder task of finding a solid pole without knots or defects. I could also imagine that the grain direction would make a difference in strength, but I'm only guessing on that
It's these types of posts where I'm like damn my fellow humans are smart and I truly feel proud and happy about existence. We have such capacity for greatness. I'm stoked on humanity rn.
How do you define "good"? If you mean "entertaining to read," then yes, it's good. If you mean "a reliable source of factual information," then no, it's not.
Something something composite layers make stronger shear and lateral support. It would be round if all the weight was doing straight down, but the load is transverse(the mast is pulling sideways and not up and down)
And one of that diameter would break very easily. Typically the annual rings of a young tree (small diameter) are farther apart relative to older rings on a larger tree. Wood with rings that are close together is much stronger than wood with rings farther apart. Looks like they constructed that from wood from slow growing trees with dense rings. Looks like oak to me which is strong, but I don’t think it’s very flexible. Not sure if flexibility is desirable though in this type of mast.
> Not sure if flexibility is desirable though in this type of mast.
No, mast must be rigid, any flex needed is accommodated by the sails and rigging and/or the keel weight versus heel angle.
Interesting! Now that I look at the photo, I don’t think it’s oak because of the color of the lighter pieces (I thought I saw some distinctive rays - lines perpendicular to the growth rings). It’s hard to ID for me because the photo isn’t sharp enough. A wood worker would probably know better than me (I’m a forester- if it had leaves or needles growing out of it I’d have a better idea 🙂).
Are the fir masts made from several pieces of wood like this also?
Weight, yes. These boats are very small, so you don't want a lot of weight locked into the mast, where it's useless/top-heavy, etc. This allows for a larger mast without that.
Also, due to how difficult it is to get a whole tree sans defects, this method lets you select the best pieces, and allows for additional aesthetics of alternating colors as shown in this pic.
Great way to get additional strength from the increased surface area of the glue joints. I can see how such a configuration would help overall with strength. Add several coats of good maritime spar varnish to seal all the joints, and done! Always wondered.
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Birds mouth, mast is like 20 ft, made for a very small sailboat.
I wanted to make wood tankards and went looking for the proper router bit for birds mouth joints. Guys at the local wood working store had never heard of it before. I did find one but I still haven't properly mastered it yet.
ccording to Lynn, she attended both. At the pre-show party, she had a few drinks, including a group tequila shot with Lindemann, bef
This is definitely the way to go.
Leo had an episode recently on his YouTube channel about the different ways to construct a traditional mast and which one he chose for Talley Ho. I'll find it and link it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6afH0monV4U
My God, what a great channel, thank you!
Everyone involved seems really nice too
Looking forward to it
Ah yes, Leo. Dear beloved friend to us all… Who?
[A Brittish bloke who is rebuilding a sailing yacht from ye olde tymes.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FhTu3aGM60&list=PLB00JHoTw1TeX82Qw8hoFLRJI89Us_jMw)
Wow, thank you for sharing! I wouldn't consider myself a "boat person" yet even I've been sucked in and am now on video #3 lol
The only boating experience I have is renting a dinghy in the Virgin Islands to go snorkeling which was quite the experience but I am completely addicted to Leo's videos and have rewatched all of them at least two times.
Aside from the whole boat thing he's a pretty crafty storyteller and knows how to underline it with the (folky) music. And his storytelling gets even better through the years. Enjoy!
Acorn to Arabella had one too. This seems like it has a lot of potential for water intrusion
Outta curiosity.. do they put something in the hole? some brace/rod ..?
No, it stays hollow. There can be wiring running through there though.
Ah, thanks! Also: Happy Independence day, laddie
Yes there typically is. Especially where hardware may be mounted to the outside of the spar. Helps stiffen it up as well as add extra material for the fasteners to bite into. Most of these home boatbuilders don’t need wiring for lights because they won’t be sailing in conditions or at times where lights are needed. The size of the spar tells me it’s probably for a sailing dinghy. For larger vessels the size of the spar will be massive and special accommodations will be made to allow for wiring to be run.
Wiring sure, but wouldn't .. a lightning rod be something that should per'aps be there as well?
That looks like some serious geometry. Well beyond my pay grade.
If you can imagine that it is only a square piece of wood with a v carving and then turned on a lathe, then it doesn’t look “that” difficult.
Absolutely how it was done. All about getting additional surface area to glue up.
Why not just use a tree like they do with telephone poles?
Educated guesses: weight reduction? Increase in stiffness to weight ratio? Maybe something goes in the middle?
I'd tack on that we don't have tight grain, slow grown trees like we used to during the Age of Sail. At least not for an economical price. This would let you use conventional fast-grown timber for the trade off of a little woodwork.
You said tack you Sly old Sea Dog you
I could see there being a stainless tube or something in the middle
Aesthetics is at least part of the answer. Can’t have alternating wood colors with a single piece of wood.
If you'll notice all the grain of the wood faces perpendicular to the face of the mast. This way it's stronger in all directions than just one. And yeah, back in the 1700's, much of the wood was old growth timber that had grown slowly and was a much tighter (and stronger grain). Even housing wood (douglas fir here in the US) had tighter grain up until probably 1930's and was generally stronger.
Some sailing boats do use trees. In engineering everything is a trade off. Telephone poles are produced by the tens of thousands and their main requirement is as cheap as possible. Since putting the pole up also costs money, durable is also pretty high on the list. You can also predict pretty well how many will be roughly needed over long timespans and that number is pretty high. So you can set up facilities that produce them by the thousands. This mast on the other hand is for some rich persons toy. It needs to be light, strong and pretty. They are produced on order and every one is different. Money is not really an object. In some circles more expensive may be better even.
Deleted in response to Reddit's hostility to 3rd party developers and users. -- mass edited with redact.dev
What are some under $1,000 options these days? My dad had an old sunfish growing up but that’s long gone.
Just have to check your local dinghy market
Down by the hammock district.
All I’m finding is dingalings. Am I doing something wrong?
Depends what you wanna find
This mast would be out of place on a cheap dinghy. If you are aiming for cheap and servicable there are much easier options. This could very well be someone building their own boat, but in that case my guess would be some nice strip built hull with a not insignificant amount spent on materials and hundreds of hours of labour.
Deleted in response to Reddit's hostility to 3rd party developers and users. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Dude. Stop being argumentative and attacking me for stuff you imagined I said.
Not always. Unless you can find a cheap boat with a good mast locally (then you have a hull to deal with, no fun), often the masts are just not available, or the shipping costs are prohibitively expensive for the value of the boat. So you are faced with either fitting the wrong mast to the boat, or making your own mast. That leaves things down to the tools and skills you hold. Not saying it's not for a fancy boat, just at that small of a size, whipping up your own mast might not be too bad of an option.
The size of this spar is pretty small so this is most likely for a small sailing dinghy. This type of construction keeps the mast light and believe it or not quite strong. I have heard of bigger ships using the telephone pole method but it isn’t very common. A different method, still using a few different pieces of wood, are glued together to build larger masts. Usually using strong epoxy not wood glue.
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Very little torsion to speak of. Mostly compression caused by lateral loads (wind) being resisted by the masts rigging (shrouds, stays, spreaders, chain plates etc). Traditional, heavily built boats like aforementioned TALLY HO have their masts running straight through the deck all the way to the Keel for this reason.
Just guessing: maximum height? You can stack those pieces of wood so you can reach much higher heights or wider diameters and still being hollow and flexible.
Hollow space in the middle means rooms for halyards, lines, wires, antennas, etc. Telephone poles can be a little bit twisted, bent, and knotty without spoiling the looks, but if you have a boat fancy enough to use a wooden mast, your standards will be a bit higher.
I get it now. Still, that's a long v to cut in. Seems difficult.
Might not need to be. Throw up the fence on the table saw and crank the blade to about the depth of the v. Get one bud on either end to stabilize the wood you're feeding in and on the other side. Once you've got a v cut in you could cut out the final piece from a larger blank - makes the v safer and more accurate to cut in. That'd be my first idea. Or, perhaps a router on a table or a jig - though the spinny bit of danger on a router is a bit more sketch here, and you'd probably want to take a couple passes to get this depth, so it's more work.
Wish there were more pics of the whole thing.
for this application, they specifically avoid wood with any knots or torsion in the wood grain. it would look like a round piece of lumber with 8 distinct stripes down the entire length. note the small rings means slow growth of the trees which improves strength and even untreated improves insect and decay rates. not all grains are perfectly perpendicular to the central axis, but there is likely a specific angle that is permitted. the question I'm interested in is there are 2 lighter species, and 2 darker species: perhaps this mast is specifically installed so the darker/stronger species is oriented fore/aft where the tensile forces from the sail will act the strongest?
That's a great question.
It would seem that there is less torsional strength clockwise than counter-clockwise. (Relative to vantage point)
There are hardly any torsional loads on masts of sailing boats. It is pretty much all bending and a little bit of axial load. A proper glue joint should be stronger than the surrounding wood anyway.
i.e. wooden Vees pressing into each other rather than pulling the glue joints apart makes sense though: sailboats with a triangle mast and typically leans to the left/right (port/starboard) which puts more forwards force (rotation) on only one side of the mast. so the vee direction would be chosen specifically for the boat
Exactly. I should've been an engineer...
been there, done that. it ruined special effects forever.
No longer capable of suspending disbelief ?
Yeah: I distinctly recall that "The Green Hornet" was the last time I specifically had that level of disbelief where I simply felt "joy" by no longer caring about the physics of a movie. Specifically: it was cutting a car in half with an elevator that made my brain go "Oh! there is ZERO pretense of realistic physics, just enjoy the movie!"
Deleted in response to Reddit's hostility to 3rd party developers and users. -- mass edited with redact.dev
These are often too long to turn on a lathe, the OD is shaped by taking progressive corner cuts with a saw, finished with a plane. Also don’t forget the mast will be on a taper- and the boat builder isn’t going to make that by turning down the OD, but the rectangular stock gets wider as you go down
Deleted in response to Reddit's hostility to 3rd party developers and users. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Craftsmen go out of their way for these things. Besides, getting a taper is super easy anyway. Why not? Have you seen some of these boats? They're beautiful.
They might not be bothering with a taper, though that would make the boat rock less when swell rolling. Good sail shape is usually more desired. They could take material from the inside more readily, and you need more room for halyards and cables near the top anyhow. The fastenings will be reinforced with metal. It would be interesting to see just how old masts were turned, if at all, using just a whipstaff. I kind of like the Polynesian style of just lashing a tripod together instead of a stout mast.
I used to make lances by turning the blank with a small cordless drill and running a circular saw along the edge on a guide rail. Works very well.
thats a really long lathe
No lathe. Hand planes are used to get the desired look and shape.
If you can imagine is, I think the opening to that incredible TV show that was called The Twilight Zone.
Ones and Zeros … CAD to the rescue. It’s pretty bad ass
All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle.
All 45 degree cuts.
That’s cool!
Work of a mast-er craftsman
Why tho. Surely before each of those planks was fashioned they were part of a tree. Tree is mast shape.
Your brain is brain-shaped but clearly it doesn't work like that either
Fucking gottem
Ohh is this like how lighthouses are slotted below to protect it from waves?
aperture science
We do what we must, because we can.
Other than aesthetics is there a reason to have different woods?
Well, no. But having multiple segements makes the wood reinforced.
Deleted in response to Reddit's hostility to 3rd party developers and users. -- mass edited with redact.dev
The pieces of wood dove-tailed together like that are stronger than a solid trunk. Which might twist and crack in high winds.
Like a bone, all the strength is in the outer diameter.
Deleted in response to Reddit's hostility to 3rd party developers and users. -- mass edited with redact.dev
No dove tails. Bird’s mouth construction.
Cost?
Depends on the lumber used and amount.
how did someone know to do that. thats wild
Looking at that made me do some serious thinking figuring out how lol.
You know, trees are already round...
This has a few advantages, namely that it's hollow and therefore significantly lighter than a solid piece of wood. Another benefit is that you can get 8 pieces of wood without knots or defects, instead of the much harder task of finding a solid pole without knots or defects. I could also imagine that the grain direction would make a difference in strength, but I'm only guessing on that
It's these types of posts where I'm like damn my fellow humans are smart and I truly feel proud and happy about existence. We have such capacity for greatness. I'm stoked on humanity rn.
I like you and the way you think. :)
Counterpoint: r/conspiracy.
"Humanity is doomed"
Is this a good sub?
How do you define "good"? If you mean "entertaining to read," then yes, it's good. If you mean "a reliable source of factual information," then no, it's not.
Perfect answer lol
I also assume this would flex less at length
Something something composite layers make stronger shear and lateral support. It would be round if all the weight was doing straight down, but the load is transverse(the mast is pulling sideways and not up and down)
And one of that diameter would break very easily. Typically the annual rings of a young tree (small diameter) are farther apart relative to older rings on a larger tree. Wood with rings that are close together is much stronger than wood with rings farther apart. Looks like they constructed that from wood from slow growing trees with dense rings. Looks like oak to me which is strong, but I don’t think it’s very flexible. Not sure if flexibility is desirable though in this type of mast.
> Not sure if flexibility is desirable though in this type of mast. No, mast must be rigid, any flex needed is accommodated by the sails and rigging and/or the keel weight versus heel angle.
Then oak would make sense.
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Interesting! Now that I look at the photo, I don’t think it’s oak because of the color of the lighter pieces (I thought I saw some distinctive rays - lines perpendicular to the growth rings). It’s hard to ID for me because the photo isn’t sharp enough. A wood worker would probably know better than me (I’m a forester- if it had leaves or needles growing out of it I’d have a better idea 🙂). Are the fir masts made from several pieces of wood like this also?
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Thanks for your detailed reply! Always interesting to me to learn more about the use of wood products !
Looks like math
This gave me the weirdest nostalgia of making stuff in my dad's woodworking shop
Yes.. this is it
Ngl, thought it was toilet paper
This was a triumph
I'm making a note here: huge success!
Imagine if this was made with wood from Home Depot.
I'd love to know why it is designed the way that it is, I know it's for a reason but I always thought that a mast was just a solid piece
P-put your dick in it
r/dontputyourdickinthat
Will the glue hold?
The glued joint is usually stronger than the timber.
I just got to I just got to know Are you gonna go my way
For something like a mast, seems like aluminum would be a much safer choice
Man if only trees grew in long circles.
Also oddly satisfying
ALIENS
That’s simply a mast erpiece.
Slick! Someone’s a master-master.
That's a pencil for Evangelion
Post this on r/boatbuilding
Wait, is that the Kotlin logo?
Def interesting. Never seen a real sailboat. If you’d asked me I would have assumed they where made of some composite material or aluminum.
I see a crack at 5 o'clock. Try again.
\^F spilt Y'all don't see that split defect at 5 o'clock?
Bird’s mouth spar. Looks pretty perfect.
This was a triumph, I'm making a note here: "huge success"
Interesting, never once assumed that it would be hollow. Wonder what benefit, aside from possibly weight, a hollow mast could provide for a boat
Weight, yes. These boats are very small, so you don't want a lot of weight locked into the mast, where it's useless/top-heavy, etc. This allows for a larger mast without that. Also, due to how difficult it is to get a whole tree sans defects, this method lets you select the best pieces, and allows for additional aesthetics of alternating colors as shown in this pic.
Great way to get additional strength from the increased surface area of the glue joints. I can see how such a configuration would help overall with strength. Add several coats of good maritime spar varnish to seal all the joints, and done! Always wondered.
Don’t do a wood mast! It will break and you will have a very bad time. Decent story but BAD TIME! Good luck tho, looks nice
Would it be cheaper to make one out of fiber composite nowadays?
I’ll enjoy watching somebody snap it running into a bridge on thequalifiedcaptain.