Ash | justflamingo.com

With some offcuts of Ash from the paddle project I thought I’d tackle making handle pads for the Laurent Giles levers. The old ones were long past saving and it seemed like a nice project for a rainy Sunday.

Flamingo has running backstays rather than fixed. The backstays are the galvanised steel cables that provide tension in the rig and some support for the mast. This means that each time you tack or gybe you need to slacken off one side (leeward or down wind) and tension up the other side (windward or up wind) to counter the force of the wind and keep the jib or foresail under the correct tension.

You can see in the photo below, the galvanised steel cable with the eye hooked on to the lever, with the lever handle pointing forward (to the right in the photo) and flat on the deck it will be slack but if you swing it through 180° to the left it tightens up.

First I cut out the rough shape with a jigsaw then sanded with drum and disc sander til I was happy with the fit. Then I ripped the block in half on the circular saw to create the two cheeks or pads. Sticking them together with double sided tape I then marked out for the first stage of shaping. Keeping crisp easily visible lines at this stage really helps get the form nice and even later on so with a drum sander in the lathe I put a chamfer all round.

After chamfering its freehand sculpting on the drum sander to get a nice soft form, with smooth transition between the flats where the rivets will go and the profile of the bronze handle.

I used some copper pop rivets to make sleeves and bronze rod to connect them. Needless to say the rods and the rivets didn’t quite match in size so a little dexterity with pliers and pillar drill was needed to drill out the copper. Once that was done it was simply a case of assembling everything on the handle and then peening over the ends of the bronze rod to clench the copper rivets tightly.

Bronze rod inserted and peened over to finish

I’m quite please with the result, it needs a good soak in linseed oil and turps to protect it but the pair of levers look much better now.

Bronze backstay levers with nice new handles!

All done and ready to fit back on the deck once I complete a couple of other tasks (finish building an extension, fit a bathroom, replace a flat roof, fit a kitchen, install a home office, install some skylights……🧐 )

Down at the ‘boatyard’ there are always distractions and with Flamingo’s new blocks all finished and nestled safely cheek by jowl… or perhaps cheek by sheave… their 1930’s pennies gleaming in oiled splendour, just waiting for their moment to shine, this old splitting axe, or maul that belonged to my mother caught my eye. There’s something about handling old tools that connects you to previous owners. I have an old smoothing plane given to me when I was 17 and just starting out, even now I seldom pick it up without thinking of Paddy and Topsy Margaret who gave me the bucket of old tools it came in. There was more than one Margaret in my life growing up, so this one took on the name of her scruffy little dog Topsy, as a differentiator between her and Fancy Margaret … I wonder if she minded… Anyway I digress. Restoring this old axe from something frankly rather lethal to a useful tool again kept mum popping in to my mind and I like to think she would have appreciated its resurrection.

A firm believer that nothing couldn’t be fixed with a bit of string and some glue, mother patched it up long after it should have been consigned to the repair box.

It didn’t take much to free the handle. I made the new one from an offcut of a paddle making project, (more on that in another post) ground a new edge and wire brushed it til it gleamed!

Tool handles.

The key thing with tool handles is straight grain and no knots. Hickory is often the go to choice for any tool that will be subject to high impact however, I really like the workability of Ash and its flexibility helps absorb the shock, plus I had some under the bench so decision made! I left the profile chamfered near the head keeping more material there as that is where any mishits (is that a word? It looks… wrong) will likely fall and shaving the handle down to the size of the eye in the axe head would have made it super skinny and, to my mind, a bit flimsy.

A couple of hardwood wedges driven into the top finished it off.

Chores

Sawing and splitting logs always reminds me of childhood chores. My weekly list was; feed the chickens and let them out, feed the geese and let them out, burn the rubbish (I know!) take out the compost, and saw up one wheelbarrow of wood to feed the venerable old Rayburn that sat, wheezing tepidly in the corner of the living room. “a man who saws his own wood, is twice warmed” mother used to reply, if I moaned about this labour. This graft earned me something like 50p (about a million in todays money I’m sure…)

Though they never had the same list of chores to help the smooth running of the house, apparently just clearing their own plate from the table is contribution enough, I did let my kids loose on the wood pile once they were old enough, if they can walk and talk, they can saw and split is my motto and they all have all their fingers and toes so it must be true.😀