First thing this morning I put another coat of varnish on the clock board and the compression post and another coat of epoxy on the chain locker. The afternoon's task was to continue the rounding process of the spars and another coat of epoxy on the chain locker.

When marking the 8-sided spar with the spar gauge to give the lines to which the spar needed to be planed to give the 16-sided spar, I found that it was easier to take one pencil out of the spar gauge and draw one line at a time and make two passes per face than trying to draw two lines per face at the same time. The planing went well as you can see here with the boom now having sixteen sides instead of the eight that it had before.

The result is okay but a little lopsided even so.

The change to 32 sides was done by eye and by not taking very much off with the plane at a time. The result is good enough.

Still lopsided in places but that won't matter.

I used a piece of 80 grit aluminium oxide paper to sand a small section of the boom and you can see how well it rounds off here. It is, however, a lot of effort and there is an easier way as you will see when the pieces arrive in the post. The result above was achieved by taking a piece of sandpaper that is 4" wide and about 30" long, looping it under the spar and then sawing the two ends up and down to sand the high spots off the wood. This can be done easily for a few minutes but it very quickly becomes painful!

The gaff was made 32-sided in the same way and here are the three spars waiting for the sanding to be done.

The chain locker is nearly ready to be dry fitted. There are three coats of epoxy on the inside encapsulating the glass fibre matting and the outside now has a coat of epoxy as well. The protruding edge of the glass fibre still needs to be trimmed back below the top edge of the box and a coat of locker paint applied and it will be done.

Finally I put a coat of varnish on the spacer piece on the main hatch before replacing the cockpit cover.