Getting Into Gear

Actually feel a sense of accomplishment tonight.  

That hoist that I've been fiddling with for the last few days finally came together.  I added the last pulley (for a total of 5), restrung it with rope, and up it went!  Slick as could be.  Only changes I made was to put a length of split hose along one end of the platform where it rubbed against the wall.  The thing doesn't want to come down once its up without encouragement, but I can live with that.  I still need to add a couple of cleats to coil the pull rope on when the hoist is in the up position, but that will have to wait until they come in the mail from Glen-L this week.  Here is a series of 6 shots showing the system in operation.

And as the guy on the infomercial says, "and that's not all!"  When I was at Lowes picking up the pulley (and some more rope!!), I decided to pick up some wood to make the mast and boom with.  The problem is that the specs call for a 13' 2"x2" Sitka Spruce mast as a blank.  Just about impossible to get out here.  So I started looking at what was available.  Yes, I could do better at Capital City Lumber, but I figured that the mast wasn't that critical.  So...

White pine....  uh uh.  The 1"x2" looked like crap, and I'd already decided that I'd splice the out of shorter lengths of 1"x2", with offset angle splices for maximum strength.  But not white pine.  

The red oak looked nice, but I know that its sucky for marine uses.  Yellow pine MIGHT work, but I didn't really like the boards they had in stock.  

Fortunately, I found one more species of lumber at Lowes...  Aspen.  Decent strength, and nice clean boards, even in the 1"x2" stock.  Picked up 2 8' boards, and 3 6' boards.  That should give me enough for both the mast and boom.

Now the plan for the mast....  First, I'm going to splice the 8' and 6' sections into two 13' pieces.  Then, the two sections are slapped together and clamped to make the mast blank.  There is additional shaping to give the mast a taper, but that is later...

Got my work lined up for this weekend, but I'm really looking forward to the day I can put in my next order for lumber and epoxy to really get started on this job.