Gordonmc
Active member
Kindly forumeers gave of their time to advise on how I should go about getting rid of the bend in my timber boom, so I thought I would give a progress report.
A friend gave a helping hand to get the boom off the boat in return for copious amounts of grog and a slap up meal, so last Sunday we crawled from sleeping bags and set to.
Of course the wind was howling and the waves were up as the gooseneck was freed and the topping lift unshackled. The boom was too big for the dinghy so it was thrown overboard. We watched as it slid beneath the waves.
Yes, I had bent on a line, so we towed the bough to shore, it acting like a huge rudder sending the dinghy round in circles.
Flash forward to the garage and my Heath-Robinson steamer:
The box is made up of half a dozen large coffee tins, the bottoms cut off to form a tube, all wrapped in seven layers of canvas, bunged up at the ends.
Two hours of steaming using the wallpaper stripper thingy and into my equally Health-Robinson jig:
The end of the 6x4 is the apex of the bend, so the far end of the boom was pushed to the right in the pic with wedges:
The boom was left in the jig overnight to cool with just a tad of over-bend to account for a bit of spring-back.
State of play now is that its had the first three coats of Le Tonk ready for the bronze-ware to be refurbed with new fastenings.
Now I just have to get it back to the mooring without messing up the varnish job. Hopefully it will survive a two hour road and ferry trip.
A friend gave a helping hand to get the boom off the boat in return for copious amounts of grog and a slap up meal, so last Sunday we crawled from sleeping bags and set to.
Of course the wind was howling and the waves were up as the gooseneck was freed and the topping lift unshackled. The boom was too big for the dinghy so it was thrown overboard. We watched as it slid beneath the waves.
Yes, I had bent on a line, so we towed the bough to shore, it acting like a huge rudder sending the dinghy round in circles.
Flash forward to the garage and my Heath-Robinson steamer:
The box is made up of half a dozen large coffee tins, the bottoms cut off to form a tube, all wrapped in seven layers of canvas, bunged up at the ends.
Two hours of steaming using the wallpaper stripper thingy and into my equally Health-Robinson jig:
The end of the 6x4 is the apex of the bend, so the far end of the boom was pushed to the right in the pic with wedges:
The boom was left in the jig overnight to cool with just a tad of over-bend to account for a bit of spring-back.
State of play now is that its had the first three coats of Le Tonk ready for the bronze-ware to be refurbed with new fastenings.
Now I just have to get it back to the mooring without messing up the varnish job. Hopefully it will survive a two hour road and ferry trip.