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Scotch pine...many a Christmas tree at our house.  Not native but common in North America.

Dave

The name Sylvestris suggests Christmas tree, but we never use it as a Christmas tree. Even the finnish word for Christmas tree is actually "Christmas spruce" and that is the only proper Christmas tree in Finland  ;D

In this country and I suspect Canada as well, Scots pine grows in fairly even terrain, while in Timo's area and along the ridge of mountains that cut Europe in half, these same pines are on uneven soil. Growing on inclined soil means they are tightly packed together and harvested less often. This makes for wholesome and useful stock for building materials. On flat ground, the trees tend to be spaced farther apart. This difference in spacing means limbs are more frequent on even soil forests, which produces mature trees with lots of little knots when harvested. This are great for Christmas trees, but not so good when you want a 12' knot free 2x8. On inclined soil, they all fight for soil and sun light which forces them to grow tall and straight before branching out, above their neighboring brothers. This makes nice building stock, but louse Christmas trees, as one side may be well branched, but the side facing the mountain is branchless.

Sometimes this inclined forest floor rule can be cheated. On my land I have a hundreds of southern yellow pines. Most are about 110 years old, the last time my land was harvested. Because the land is fertile, receives a tremendous amount of sunlight annually and hasn't been disturbed with fires or selective cutting, the SYP is about 60 to 80 feet tall and they are very tightly packed. Most haven't any branches for the first 30' while a substantial amount haven't any for the first 50'. That's right, 50' lengths of perfectly clear, straight grained SYP.

I also have oaks of every color and many of these also have very straight, "lean" trunks. I cut two a couple of years ago for a project I was working on and the first had a 30' trunk with no branches, while the second had about 25' until the crotch. Both, where 18" white oaks. All because of the very tight grouping and unmolested growing area. In our current economic environment (last 50 years), unmolested tree stands are typically cut and replanted with fast growing (quickly harvested) pines. This is a economic choice made by the land owner, but some first and second growth still remain. I still have several acres of second growth. Mountainous terrain is difficult to harvest, so it's more prevalent, for building material stock, I just got lucky with my flat land stuff.

The (lower) branches are also actively trimmed off the standing trees while they are young to produce knotless timber.
This is young trees where you might pick the best ones to trim them and let them grow old. Most of the trees are harvested earlier for pulping, but the selected ones are allowed to grow old and they are sold as logs to sawmills.

This is how I made the scarfs into the staves for masts.  The plywood guide was attached just slightly higher than the thickness of the staves so I could put the sticks under it.


After using the skilsaw I had five staves ready.


Here is the jig to glue the pieces together. There is a stripe of packaging tape to prevent the epoxy from sticking into the jig.


I glued the blank for main boom from two pieces yesterday. And again, it is not possible to have too many clamps. My inventory is on the heavy side, which was good for the boom but I will need to get a lot more and a lot lighter clamps for planking.

It's pretty important to proportion scarf's properly. I'll assume your stave stock is about 18 - 19 mm, which means the scarf should be 152 mm if scarfing the thickness (typical). It's very unusual to have a stave scarfed across it's width, which not only would make a much longer joint, it's also in line with torsional loads. Generally, you want scarfs to oppose loads, so the joint is perpendicular to the load path. On most spars this means the scarf is angled from outside to inside of the finished piece. This leaves only the single horizontal seam exposed, which is less objectionable looking to most eyes. Ideally the slope of the scarf should have the inboard (inside the mast) seam facing up, so if a splash hit the mast and the joint let moisture in, it would naturally drain out of, not into the mast.

On a lightly loaded rig like this one, the standing rigging bears most of the load, so you'll probably be fine.

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