OZ PDRacer Mast Timber Thickness - 10mm?

**pb12** · 13th February 2009, 02:35 PM

Hi,

Just in the planning stages and I plan to build the mast of the PDRacer first. After visiting a couple of timber merchants my best choice for mast timber looks to be untreated, 10mm finished thickness, finger jointed radiata pine.
i.e. few or no knots, straight and 5.4m lengths ......... perfect. Except the plans call for 12mm thickness.

So........ would substituting 10mm for 12mm thickness timber be too far out of spec for a functional mast?

Could I say, add more stave blocks to stiffen the mast up if the 10mm is too thin ?

Any other ideas would be appreciated.

Otherwise my next option is 18mm thickness and try to hand plane it down to 12mm. A lot of waste, a lot of work and 50% additional cost.

Phil

**Boatmik** · 13th February 2009, 11:38 PM

Howdy,

Finger jointing will break like matchsticks. It doesn't have enough surface area for the joins to work effectively. For a mast the only real option is a 6:1 scarf join.

See if you can get some stuff thicknessed down to the listed 12mm too .. it means that there won't need to be any compensation made with the mast overall dims or by glassing some of it.

More later.

Have to get out of this internet cafe.

MIK

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