In Archaeology of the Boat, Greenhill identifies the next evolutionary step – the discovery that the seaworthiness of the dugout could be ‘greatly improved by softening the sides with fire and water and then forcing them apart with wooden struts’. That year’s model was what archaeologists would come to know as the expanded dugout, a construction technique still in use in some communities around the world today. This was quite a step, requiring as it did a fundamental grasp of physics and materials science. Somehow, someone discovered not only that timber can be softened and manipulated in this way, but also that when it cools down it retains the shape into which it has been coerced.
On its own, this process was another evolutionary cul-de-sac. The size of boats built in this fashion would still be limited by the diameter of the tree trunk from which they were made – they could only be expanded so far. But then came the breakthrough that can truly be described as the first step towards the development of clinker, a technique that would change the world. As soon as the tools and skills necessary for splitting logs became available, says Greenhill, the expanded dugout ‘could be made more efficient still by extending the sides with planks’.
First one plank, then a second and then a third were added, at first ‘sewn’ together with natural fibres, later fixed with wooden pegs, or trenails, driven through them. Initially, this type of boat was still limited by the size of the tree from which its main component, the expanded dugout, was hewn. But as techniques for cutting planks from logs and fixing them together improved, so the role of the dugout itself would shrink, either disappearing altogether or withering to become nothing more than the keel of a boat made otherwise entirely from overlapping planks.
The clinker breakthrough appears to have been made in northern Europe, which, Greenhill speculates, may have been partly because of the development there of a technique for splitting logs known as ‘cleft planking’. Today, power tools make it easy to slice planks from a log, which mainly produces so-called tangential planking, cut at a tangent to the heart of the tree. But before efficient saws evolved, let alone electric motors, Nordic boatbuilders developed a technique for making planks by driving wedges and axes into a tree trunk along its length. Flush-joining such wedge-shaped planks edge to edge would have been extremely difficult, concludes Greenhill, ‘and it could be that the natural solution, a full overlapping of the edges, followed from this historical situation’.
As I take up unfamiliar tools to begin the equally alien process of building a clinker boat, it’s impossible not to contemplate with reverence an evolutionary lineage that stretches back not only two millennia to the first full expression of the form, but more than 10,000 years to its ultimate ancestor, the dugout canoe.
In South America, almost thirty years ago, in attempting and failing so spectacularly to master the handling of that most basic of boats, I stumbled unwittingly on the forerunner of a maritime tradition that would come to revolutionise human development. I had also borne witness to the disintegration of a cultural identity.
As I sat in the shade salving my hurt pride with an ice-cold beer (one clear benefit of the impact of modernisation), I watched as five or six of the locals exchanged their shorts, flipflops and T-shirts – one, as I recall, was wearing the complete Manchester United away kit – for traditional native dress, just in time to greet an aircraft full of tourists who had flown in for an authentic ethnic-experience-and-barbecue evening. It was clear that each member of this tribe no longer had either need or mastery of the seven or so basic skills upon which their predecessors had depended for survival. Each one was a specialist of sorts – hotelier, cook, outboard-motor engineer – catering to the needs of tourists. No one, so far as I could discern, was engaged in the sweaty, back-breaking business of hacking canoes out of tree trunks.
Even at the time I could see that my disappointment was an unjustified manifestation of a kind of cultural imperialism. Who was I to expect these people to freeze-frame their development solely to afford me a photo opportunity? Why on earth shouldn’t they seek to improve their lot by engaging with the modern world on their terms? I bought a souvenir bow and arrow and waited for the Twin Otter to return from Ciudad Bolívar.
Thirty years ago in the Gran Sabana, it was clear to me that the remote grandeur that had once inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World had itself been rendered all but extinct. Today, as I contemplate the task ahead, I too feel like a member of a fast-disintegrating tribe, cut off from an all-too-recent past by a rising tide of change that has left each of us unable to do much with our hands beyond swiping our fingers across the screen of a tablet.
8
SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND
‘This work difficult as it would be to an European with his Iron tools they perform without Iron and with amazing dexterity . . . Their tools are made with the bones of men, generally the thin bone of the upper arm; these they grind very sharp and fix to a handle of wood . . .’
– Joseph Banks, chief of scientific staff on Captain James Cook’s first voyage, on the boatbuilding tools used by the natives of the Society Islands archipelago in the Pacific, 1769
23 JANUARY 2017
I’ve never been the sort of man who likes to accumulate tools, for the simple reason that I have never had a use for them. Long, bitter and costly experience has taught me that DIY, and the investment in equipment that inevitably must precede it, is a false economy. Far better to pay someone who knows what they are doing and have the job done properly at the outset than to waste hours or even days on a disaster that then has to be put right by – well, by someone who knows what they are doing.
But after my first visit to the Nottage Institute it strikes me, more or less for the first time, that in order to build a boat I will need access to rather more weaponry than I already have at my disposal. Both Fabian and John Lane, his assistant on the Nottage course, have promised to email me their ‘minimum requirements’ tool lists. Fabian’s was drawn up for people embarking on building the Nottage dinghy, while John’s was put together for apprentices joining the boatbuilding Pioneer Trust in Brightlingsea.
In the meantime, I think, an inventory is clearly in order and so from under the stairs I drag out my plastic B&Q toolbox, last seen during the great bath-panelling fiasco of 2015. I’ve forgotten that the clasps holding the toolbox lid shut failed within a day or two of purchase, and when I pick it up by the handle the whole thing falls open, showering assorted nails, screws and bolts of uncertain provenance all over the floor. Startled, I straighten up and strike the top of my head on the low doorframe. The blood that trickles down my forehead won’t be the last I’ll be shedding over the coming months.
I take stock of the pitiful contents. Two rolls of masking tape (unused), one large spider (deceased), a couple of screwdrivers, a spanner (no idea where that came from), a Stanley knife (blade rusted), a hammer, one pair of pliers, a £1 coin and a £20 FIXA drill from IKEA (estranged from its charging cable) that I once used to put up some equally cheap IKEA blinds (crookedly). I pocket the coin, certain that I will soon be needing it, along with many of its pals.
Awaiting the arrival of the tool lists, I decide to get ahead of the game by consulting Leather, one of my League of Dead Experts. In Clinker Boatbuilding he includes an exhaustive list of the tools any traditional boatbuilder should regard as essential and now is clearly the time to take his advice on board.
Much of that advice seems to focus on saws. Leather sings the praises of a ‘good panel saw, 20in long, ten teeth per in, with a narrow blade, if possible . . . the teeth should be fine with not too much set, i.e. not bent or set alternately very wide apart from each other’. But a saw, surely, is a saw? Apparently not. There follows a cast of rip saws, tenon backsaws, turning saws and compass saws, not to mention a supporting chorus of saw files for sharpening saws and a saw set for setting or adjusting the angle of saw teeth . . .
Hold on, I think. That’s an awful lot of saws and saw-related paraphernalia – and
planes, not one of which I recognise by name: trying planes, jack planes, smoothing planes, rebate planes . . .
I consult other members of the league to get their take on the tools question, but surprisingly on this issue they are of little help. In Complete Amateur Boat Building Michael Verney has nothing – quite literally nothing – to say on the subject. This only reinforces my feeling that our skills-based past is vanishing rapidly in the rearview mirror. Perhaps in 1948, when the first edition of Verney’s book came out, there wasn’t a man alive in England to be found without a complete range of woodworking tools hanging from a leather belt slung around his waist.
McKee, writing in 1972, appears to subscribe to the same conceit, referring in passing only to ‘the more common hand tools’, on the implicit understanding that any reader would surely know exactly what those might be. Likewise, Gardner assumes that anyone reading his Building Classic Small Craft need not be taught how to suck eggs. Or to use tools.
Leather’s list, meanwhile, grows ever longer, each alien item nudging me closer to despondency. When I reach a sub-list, introduced with the daunting remark ‘the following tools would need to be made by an amateur’, I quietly set Leather to one side.
I’m spared further contemplation of the widening gulf between men of my generation and Leather’s when John’s list arrives, followed almost immediately by Fabian’s. To my relief, both prove rather less expansive and altogether more pragmatic than Leather’s. Both men recognise that I am not planning to embark on a new career as a shipwright, and so should be encouraged to acquire only the bare minimum of tools necessary for the task at hand.
John has divided his into ‘must-haves’, ‘usefuls’ and ‘nice-to-haves’. The must-have list, I’m pleased to see, is only twenty-four items long, ranging from three types of plane, a set of chisels and a spokeshave to just a couple of saws, a long and a short spirit level and a round-headed ‘ball-peen’ hammer for riveting.
Fabian’s list chimes with John’s in almost every detail – if anything, it’s even more frugal. ‘I would advise buying just as little as possible at first until you get the feel of what would best suit you,’ he writes, which suits me and my limited budget just fine. A couple of Black & Decker Workmates, he adds, would almost certainly come in handy.
As it turns out, over the coming months I will find myself turning again and again to just a handful of tools. A couple of cheap chisels of different widths, which I get from B&Q, are in constant use, as is a slightly more specialist paring chisel, which I pick up from a nearby dealer in second-hand tools. The paring chisel has a longer blade and a less prominent handle, which will come in handy when working on rebates at the end of planks.
Three types of plane are the other tools that are never more than an arm’s length away. The largest is a Record No. 4 smoothing plane, an all-purpose tool with a 2in-wide blade. Heavy and delightful to hold, it has wooden grips, which somehow manage to convey a sense of what’s going on at the cutting edge through the user’s hands. This will prove useful for clearing away larger amounts of wood before switching to a smaller plane for fine-tuning. For this I will employ a Stanley block plane, which can be used with one hand and will see more action than any other tool.
The most essential plane, however, is a little shoulder, or rabbet, plane, a Stanley 92. Hard to find in UK chain stores – even supposedly specialist trade shops – I eventually track down a used model. The blade of the shoulder plane goes right up to the edge of the plane – hence the ‘shoulder’; it will plane a surface abutted by another piece of wood right up to the edge of the join and, as I will discover, there are a lot of surfaces like that on boats. Billed as ‘vintage’, it isn’t cheap but, as I will find out, there’s no making a traditional wooden boat without one.
And, compared to the one ludicrously expensive item, featured on both lists, from which there is, apparently, no getting away, it’s a steal. All modern traditional boatbuilders, I learn, have a dirty little secret, which relies on a supply of high-voltage electricity: the bandsaw. I admit that, until I saw one in action at the Nottage Institute, slicing a plank of timber along its length in seconds flat, I had no real idea what a bandsaw was.
When the Nordic clinker revolution exploded some 1,200 years ago, launching marauding bands of Anglo-Saxons and, later, Vikings around Europe and beyond, building a boat capable of crossing seas and oceans was a laborious, time-consuming business, reliant upon inherited skills, a fair bit of brute force and, by and large, a handful of tools surprisingly similar to those found today in any DIY store. We know this because in 1936 a farmer ploughing a field on the Swedish island of Gotland unearthed a wooden tool chest, later dated to between the eighth and eleventh centuries – the period of the Viking age. The so-called Mästermyr find contained dozens of tools that would be more or less recognisable to today’s weekend DIY enthusiast. They included snips, a ball-peen hammer, files, bradawls, hacksaw, chisels, a handsaw (just the one, Mr Leather) and a pair of drawknives – a kind of large-scale version of a modern spokeshave, wielded with two hands.
Only the hand axes and the large broad-axe that were in the chest might look out of place in the workshop of a traditional boatbuilder today. Yes, axe and adze can be wielded to rough-shape keels, stems, sternposts, planks and so on but, as Fabian puts it, ‘who has the time? Life is too short.’
So in their place in boatyards the length and breadth of the land will be found the electric bandsaw, which slices through wood like butter. I consult with Fabian. Yes, he says, a bandsaw is indispensable; I must have one. I will need it to quickly cut pieces of wood that otherwise would have to be laboriously hand-sawn and, most importantly, without it I will find it all but impossible to shape the boat’s stem, stern, keel and planks. Sold.
I have no idea why Leather chose not to include the bandsaw on his list – it has, after all, been around since the nineteenth century, in one form or another. I can only assume that somehow it offended his traditional aesthetic. I can respect that. But I’m not about to emulate it. Every traditional boatbuilder I’ve encountered relies on them, from Gus at Pin Mill to Fabian and John. At the Pioneer Trust in Brightlingsea, where John trains apprentices, they’ve worked on the restoration of a derelict 70ft Essex oyster smack, built in 1864, a 120-year-old Stour lighter of the type painted by John Constable, and one of the clinker-built lifeboats from the Cutty Sark, the last of the mighty nineteenth-century tea clippers. At no point did they consider doing so without the assistance of the mighty bandsaw.
I will have an awful lot of wood that will need sawing – thirty-six planks, for a start, some up to 10ft long – and to do it all by hand would be impossible. Over the next few months, once I have overcome my fear of its ability to rip my arm off in a moment, I will come to rely utterly upon the bandsaw. Only when a piece of wood that is already fixed to the boat requires sawing will I resort to a handsaw, and then it will be a £9.99 disposable Roughneck from B&Q.
There are many pitfalls for the innocent purchaser of power tools, and never more so than when it comes to bandsaws. Every bandsaw operates on the same principle: an electric motor drives a continuous, vertically aligned loop of saw-edged metal at frightening speed. Simply to touch a piece of wood against this rapidly circulating band is to see it sliced through with the same efficiency demonstrated by a guillotine blade on a French aristocrat’s neck. But not all bandsaws are equal, as I discover when I try to order one online.
After hours of research I think I’ve done rather well, tracking one down for under £250, but something makes me pause and call the customer hotline. That’s when I find out that the machine I am about to order is in fact a mere modeller’s model, capable of handling timber of only the meanest proportions.
Luckily, help is close at hand. Tucked away in the backstreets of Ipswich, my nearest big town, is a hardware store straight out of the ’50s. Elmers, ‘a good old-fashioned general hardware store where personal service and customer satisfaction is still important’, has bee
n going strong since 1959. Its secret appears to be that it carries every single item ever made that could even vaguely be categorised as hardware – a broad range that fortunately for me includes several bandsaws.
Elmers is busy when I arrive, with crop-haired professional tradesmen in reinforced boots bustling to and fro and on first-name terms with the staff, who all seem to know exactly what each of them needs. Having come directly from a suit-and-tie appointment in town, I now wish I’d dressed the part. Eventually one of the salesmen becomes free.
‘I’m after a chainsaw,’ I say. Dammit. ‘I mean, bandsaw.’
He nods, getting the measure of me with the subtlest of head-to-toe appraisals. ‘May I ask what for, sir?’
‘Er, cutting wood. Timber. For a boat. I’m building a boat.’
Even I’m not convinced. He smiles a little and tilts his head slightly to one side in that way that can express either mild curiosity or frank disbelief.
‘Are we talking the Queen Mary, sir, or something a little smaller? What sort of throat depth are you looking for?’
‘Tiny. Well, about 10ft long. The boat, that is, not the . . . throat depth . . .’
I have no idea what a throat depth is. I wish I’d brought the plans with me. I rack my memory – the thickest piece of wood I am likely to have to cut will be the keel, or one of the component parts – the stem, the sternpost – that attaches to it. It’s . . . what? 50mm wide? Or is it 75mm?
‘I need something that will cut through a piece of wood 100mm deep,’ I say, feigning confidence.
Patiently, he explains that throat depth is not the maximum depth of cut that the machine can handle, but the horizontal distance between the blade and the vertical supporting column at the edge of the cutting table. What will be the widest piece of wood I will need to cut?
How to Build a Boat Page 9