The picture of the white mast with the parrel beads was of Peking Duck.

OliveOyl has had four different un-stayed masts.  One for a leg 'o mutton sail, one for a balanced lug sail and two more for the two different Chinese junk sails.  all the masts were solid and square in cross section.  The edges were rounded with a 3/4 inch router bit.  I not observed any binding of the spars when rotating around the mast.

Jim Michalak wrote an engineering piece on square v round masts and hollow v solid.  I have looked for this article but it seems his writings are no longer available as his website has been abandoned.  If my memory is correct, for boats with 16 to 24 foot masts, there was not a lot of weight savings to be gained by going from a solid to a hollow mast while maintaining the same stiffness.  Also for solid mast with the same cross section dimension as a round mast there was a more stiffness to be gained in a square mast with little difference in weight. 

Many years ago I built a Ruel Parker Small Ohio Sharpie that had masts somewhere in the 24 foot long range.  Living in Western Canada at that time I was able to buy some log pole pine teepee polls that I whittled down to the design mast dimensions.  It was a lot of work compared to gluing up dimension lumber.

As for gluing up dimension lumber for a mast I have used, filled epoxy (West System), Polyurethane glue (PL Premium) and Crosslinked PVA glue (Titebond 3).  All three have worked well with no failures on the glue line. 

The only mast I had fail was on my Michalak AF3.  In and effort to decrease weight of the mast I took the original square mast and made it round.  During a lively day of sailing it cracked but did not fracture and we were able to make it back home at reduced speed.  This happened during the mast's third summer on the water.

While living in western Canada I was able to buy dimension lumber up to 24 feet in length.  here in Ottawa I have never been able to buy longer that 16 foot boards.  When building a longer mast I have been using a 12:1 'V" shaped scarf.  The scarf is cut with a circular saw finishing the cut to the 1/4 inch hole with a handsaw. For the gluing the joint I have been using a gap-filling polyurethane glue (PL Premium).  The backing piece of dimension lumber is used to align the scarf joint.  I have attached a sketch to augment this description.

We had a square mast, with well-radiused corners on Missee Lee and I made a square topmast for Fantail.  I would have to disagree with David,  As a fairly unskilled woodworker, I found the staved, round topmast that I built for FanShi, considerably more difficult to build.  The fact that it is a lot better looking than Fantail's is entirely due to the fact that I had very limited materials available for the latter.  Missee Lee's mast was very attractive, to my eye.

Graham wrote:Hi David.  I found your photos and description very clear and encouraging.  I was always worried about putting the taper in, thinking I had to add it to the staves before gluing, resulting in continually changing angles, but it looks like you made straight staves.  Did you put taper in the section afterwards, and how much?  Obviously this would thin the walls of the tapered section? 

That topmast is actually "half a barrel"-shaped, as far as I remember, though that effect is quite small and may not be evident in the photos. The staves are curved - more or less parallel at the bottom, converging towards the top. A full-length mast would be subtly curved above and below the partners, so the staves are too. This is quite simple - if you draw out the cross sections at various heights, you can measure off the widths of the staves at those points, and use a spline to draw a fair curve.  The 30˚ bevel remains the same all the way up. The thickness of the staves remains the same, too, although it might decrease towards the top: as per PJR, you could choose to make it a certain percentage of the diameter. I didn't think that necessary, but it does mean that the internal diameter gets very small at the top, so that a bit of reduction of thickness of the stave on the inside, very near the top, is needed to permit a wiring conduit to get right up to the masthead.

Andrew, you’re right about the difficulties of sourcing aluminium poles in Ireland, I too have searched in vain. However, in Ireland’s favour, we do seem to be blessed with imports of surprisingly good spruce and friendly timber-yards where one can usually spend time sorting through a whole bale of 18’ 6x2s to find the good pieces, as long as you put everything else back neatly. McMahons in Limerick import very good clear C24 spruce which is perfect for masts, and douglas fir too. I don’t think you need much more than a circular saw and a hand plane to turn out a mast. My spruce mast is coated in Le Tonkinoise varnish and is standing up to Irish conditions and junk chaffing very well. I highly recommend having a go yourself. And don’t discount making a solid mast such as done by Alan on Wave Rover II on YouTube, looks like it works as he’s just about to make landfall in Ireland!

Kirill, is this the one?

It's one of Herb Mcleod's, but I couldn't be sure if it's Olive Oyle or Peking Duck.

The latter, I think.