Hello all,

I finally had time to rip into the two 46' sailboat masts that I salvaged by kayak from a beach on a small island offshore. I am stoked about the wood, which is old-growth dry douglass fir. The masts are circa late 1970-ish. Next time I go back I will spend more time figuring out what the exact make and date of the vessel was.

As noted in previous post, the masts were made of flatsawn sides and mostly rift and quarter-sawn fore and aft pieces. The aft piece had huge screws every 3.25" holding the sail track on. Argh. That was a lot of work to get off and means I will have to split that piece along the middle instead of using it whole, but I still got TONS of wood out of this mast. The picture below is of one 20' section after cutting up.

The mast is a box made of 1" thick sides, 3" fore, and 2" aft pieces. The pieces are dadoed with a lap joint so I had to choose which part of that joint to sacrifice when I made my cuts. I decided to schedule the cuts so that there is one "factory" edge on each board so I have one straight edge to guide through the saw. I snapped a line down the mast and used a circular saw with a very good freud blade to rip down the line. The problem was that each mast had blocking inside about 24" long that was epoxied all over. That made things much more difficult than just cutting it up. I had to split that out and ended up damaging the wood in some parts, but for the most part I got clear wood in 10 to 16 foot lengths. There were scarf joints all over the place. This mast was definately built on the cheap. I feel much better now, as I really hated ripping it up even though it was no longer good for a mast. Now that I see the construction I feel I did justice by ripping it apart. Bill Hamm may be right that this was a replacement to the original mast. Inside was pvc conduit that I believe is newer than the boat. Maybe some old-timers can tell me when they started making PVC conduit. There were, however, some repairs done to the mast where they splined a joint that had split.

Anyway, since my chainsaw broke I don't have a saw that cuts deep enough to remove that big block o' wood you see in the left piece. I tried ripping one piece out and that destroyed the good wood rather than the wood block as I had hoped. There is a block at the base of each mast, and about half way up the mast as well where the spreaders were mounted. The spreaders, by the way, should yield some great pieces for masiks, stern posts, and what-not.

Although on most of the pieces I did a pretty good job of hand-cutting with a framing saw, I did get a bit wobbly here and there. I am taking down that bit on the edge with a hand plane and will then run it through the power planer on each side before ripping it into strips. I will only rip one for now and hope to get enough wood for a SUP, two SOF's, and a few surfboards.

Will keep ya posted! I am being called to dinner. Gotta run.