Most people who make their own wooden mast also choose to make their own booms. Normally you would make them out of spruce and simply mill them to correct dimensions. Some decide to also laminate their booms from two or three individual layers that they’ve milled down on the table saw. In my case, because I have access to a laser cutter and can play around a bit, I decided to make my own “artsy-techno-structural-funky-scifi-ishy” booms out of 1/32” plywood. I ended up with a really funky set of booms, but I like them. Contact me if you want the same booms, but if not, then use your own creativity and imagination to come up with your own design. There are several businesses that will happily laser cut the parts for you. For my latest main boom, we used National Balsa because the laser cutter that I have access to is down. They cut two sheets of plywood for me using my own designs, and they charged $65 (USD, 2018) including materials and shipping. It’s a bit spendy, but if you can s...

Last winter I designed a crazy looking, laser cut mainsail boom for my Sun Wind II RC sailboat. The idea was to add a bit of high-techy, artsy, far-outness to an updated 1949 design... and in the process make a boom that was both lightweight and strong. It's made of 8 layers of 1/32" plywood cut on the laser cutter and then epoxy laminated together. Here are the laminations after being cut out. Then I put some tape down on a piece of MDF so that the epoxy wouldn't stick. After that, I drilled three holes and put sticks in them to hold the pieces in alignment. Then I mixed up some epoxy and brushed it onto all the inside surfaces. Before putting them onto the MDF though, I gently wiped them down with a paper towel to remove most of the excess. When I did a similar technique for the swing arm, I noticed that I had a lot of excess and that it looked bad. Hopefully I've avoided most of that issue on the boom. The amount of epoxy that remained on the laminatio...