Last night, before the 372nd round of sanding, over-sanding, and re-coating various parts of the hull interior -- trying to get an epoxy seal without too many extraneous globs -- I did a little more work on the spars. The boom will be the union of two long sticks, screwed-and-glued together in a "T" shape. But first I wanted to round off the ends.
The yard -- to which most of mainsail's luff (leading edge) will be lashed -- is just a weird-looking, 5-sided board. I rounded off the ends of that, too. See, here they are at one end.
Because of my lack of woodworking skills and experience, every little task like this affords me a certain amount of adventure, uncertainty, drama. To shape the ends of the boom components, for example, I had some tool options: saw (to remove the big chunks), file, rasp, Dremel tool with sanding drum, random orbit sander, sandpaper and sanding block. And I suppose I could have used a router to do the rounding-over of the corners (but I didn't).
I used different approaches, and tool combinations, with each end of each component. They all worked fine. I'm no smarter than when I started. But I suppose any day I walk away from my Japanese-style pull saw without a gushing artery is a good day.
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