Spar Shop – Shop Tour

This Viewer Shop comes from Joe, who is the communications director for the Spar Shop at the Historical Seaport in Aberdeen, Washington.

The Spar Shop at the Historical Seaport specializes in ship masts and spars, as well as custom columns and poles. We also provide custom milling of gaffs, booms, timbers, beams and cants. Our 10,000-square-foot drive-through shop is one of a kind, featuring the largest tracer-lathe in North America. We can turn logs up to 40 inches in diameter and 122 feet in length. With our two sawmills, we can mill logs as large as six feet in diameter, and create timbers as long as 100 feet or more. Our Job Shop offers custom fabrication of movie set pieces, museum exhibits and thematic elements for custom homes and commercial buildings as well as short-run-production woodworking projects.

You can learn more about the Spar Shop at TheSparShop.org.

Spar Shop Operations Manager Kent Wall checks the diameter of a log in North America’s largest tracer mill, which can handle logs up to 122 feet long.

Spar Shop crew re-position a yard on the tracer lathe, North America’s largest. The Spar Shop turns large logs into masts, spars, booms, and gaffs for sailing ships.

Spar Shop Operations Manager Kent Wall cuts a cedar log into custom-sized planks with a 30-HP Lucas Mill sawmill.