Gaff and Boom Jaws - Leatherwork

When I rigged the boat in the post before last I tape some pieces of cloth around the jaws on the booms and gaffs to protect the finish on the masts. The proper way to do this is to "leather" the jaws or the mast or both. Fitting leather to the mast is the easy option; the problem with this is that the gaffs slide up and down and it is impractical to wrap the whole mast. So I put leather around the mainmast where the boom contacts it and leather around the jaws on the main gaff and both the mizzen gaff and boom. I've run out of leather but will get more and put leather on the main boom jaws as a belt and braces approach in that area of heavy wear.

Here are a sequence of photos taken at various stages on various jaws showing how I shaped, fitted and fixed the leather. Starting with a bare set of jaws.

As an aside at this point, I am not 100% happy with these jaws. I started out using 9mm plywood for the jaws but someone suggested that this was not strong enough and the plywood would delaminate under the load. So I reinforced them with some solid timber pieces. The result is probably strong enough but not particularly tidy. Laminated hardwood for the whole jaw would have been better.

Piece of leather in place in the next picture. The lines are where cuts need to be made so that the leather will bend around the curved sections. Once the leather is wet (see below) it is more flexible and I may have made too many cuts but this is my first attempt at doing this and I have a limited amount of leather so can't afford too much trial and error!

 

This is what my marked up piece of leather looks like. A bit like it has been crawled over by a spider dipped in ink.

 

 

Having cut the excess off and along the lines between the tabs the leather is offered up to the jaws for a test fit.

 

It looks OK so it is soaked in water for a couple of hours, longer would be better but 2 hours makes it flexible enough (and it dries out quicker!). It doesn't look much different but it is soft and floppy and will now take the required shape.

To get it into the final shape it is bandaged. I used some of that not slip rubbery matting because I had some in small rolls. I simply sawed off chunks about 25 mm wide from the end of the roll. The leather is bound into place, working from the bottom of the jaws outwards. It's tricky, a bit like bandaging the joint between thumb and forefinger but the non slip tapes worked well.

 

Here is a finished jaw. The curve on this one is not as great and the leather took the compound curves quite well. Once the leather has dried out (24 hours) it has quite firmly adopted its new shape and does not try to go back to its flat state. Here the leather has been trimmed and fixed into place with copper boat nails.

 

I will saturate the leather with neatsfoot oil over a period of days to give it some protection against the weather. The oiling will need to be repeated periodically as the oil dries out.