You will recall that I managed to bonk a ladder onto an innocent-bystander spar -- actually, one of the three parts which will be assembled, eventually, to become the dinghy's boom. For you lubbers, that's the thingie that stretches, more-or-less horizontally, along the bottom edge of the mainsail.
I shared the ugly damage with you, and also with my boat-building colleagues on a pair of invaluable online forums, whose addresses you can find somewhere on this page if I haven't messed it up.
Almost all -- no, all -- of the denizens of these forums know more about woodworking and boatbuilding that I'll ever know (I may have the edge on them in the marketing of Business Intelligence, or perhaps of attractive condiment dispensers, but that will not get the boat built, as we say on the forums).
Most of them predicted doom. The wood fibers are damaged. Spars get their strength from their surfaces, and this surface is hosed. If you have extra wood, cut out the damage and splice it with a scarf joint. Buy a new piece. Spare no expense. You don't want to be out in the middle of Puget sound, an Alaska-bound cruise ship bearing down on you, when a Big Puff takes you by surprise and splinters your weakened boom into a pair of oversize toothpicks. Oh, no.
There is every reason to believe they are right.
But as I hinted above, the wounded piece is just a part of the eventual boom. It's a long, plank-shaped plank -- very planklike. Another long piece get screwed-and-glued to it, making it into a protracted "T". This will add strength, of course, and reduces the extent to which the damaged piece contributes overall strength. Yeah, there's another piece, but that part's even more boring than what you've already slogged through.
Well, yeah, the other camp says, given the "T" shape of the assembled piece, and the fact that part of the Big Bruise usually gets trimmed off with a roundover bit anyway, it's probably not that big a deal. Just fill the hole with more wood (and epoxy), or just all epoxy, and hey, if the cruise ship runs you down, at least it's an interesting end to things.
So I filled the ding with thickened epoxy. Just look!
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