No idea. Again, perhaps the plans would have been useful. Most of the cutting will be lengthwise trimming of planks, and from memory no plank stock will be wider than 100mm . . . but then there’s the transom, the stem . . . ‘About 150mm,’ I say, with as much confidence as I can muster.
‘Then you will need the Record Premium 12in bandsaw, aka the BS300E,’ he says. ‘It will cut up to 190mm deep and its throat depth is 305mm.’
It’s £500. The next model up, I learn, costs over £1,000, so the decision is made for me.
‘You’re in luck, sir,’ he says. ‘We have one out the back. Do you have a van?’
I don’t. I have a Honda Jazz, but at least the back seat folds down and I’ve remembered to remove Phoebe’s child seat. It takes three of us to manoeuvre the huge and heavy cardboard box into the back of the car, which settles down wearily onto its rear shock absorbers like it might never get back up again. The bandsaw weighs 80kg, which is pretty much the same as me, though as I drive it carefully towards its new home I reflect that my wallet, at least, has become appreciably lighter.
Somehow, when I get to the shed I manage to manhandle it out of the car on my own without rupturing something. There is some ingenious application of levers and rolling the thing end over end. When I tear the packaging off I discover there is a certain amount of soul-destroying self-assembly involved, which, given the price tag, frankly seems a bit much. It takes me a whole day to get the beast up and running. Finally, there it is and I spend some time admiring my handiwork. I have gone from owning almost no power tools to owning the power tool and, despite myself, it feels rather good.
There’s one other big item without which I think I probably can’t manage – a workbench of some sort. Buying one, however, will blow my budget, so I decide to make my own. This, I reason, will be a good preparatory exercise in basic woodwork for a man who hasn’t so much as held a chisel since he was at school.
Googling ‘Build a workbench YouTube’ brings up a bewildering array of instructional videos and I watch half a dozen before settling on ‘How to build a professional style workbench’, a fourteen-minute demonstration with over a million views. The host is the self-styled ‘Zac, the West Virginia DIY guy’ and, wearing a leather tool belt, he certainly looks the part. More importantly, his workbench looks good and solid, and (in his hands, at any rate) quick to build. I write down everything he says I need and I am literally about to head off to B&Q to stock up when the phone rings. It’s John. He has an old 10ft workbench he no longer needs and he’d be happy for me to have it. Me too. I hire a long-wheelbase van and drive over to his place, about twenty minutes away, and pick it up.
John gives me something else, even more valuable, when I turn up at his house – a lecture on the vital importance of sharpening my tools. To reinforce the message, he also gives me an old oil stone and a swift lesson in how to use it, and recommends I buy a copy of the Collins Complete Woodworker’s Manual. Later, Fabian will give me the same lecture, along with instructions to go and buy myself a bench-grinder, emphasising that I should start every working day with a tool-sharpening session.
Absolutely, I say. I don’t let on to either of them that until that moment I genuinely had no idea that tools needed sharpening.
9
FIRST, TAKE YOUR TREE
‘Essentially a clinker boat is a shell of overlapping strakes into which stiffening is inserted. Thus the first thought of the builder must be about the timber for this shell.’
– Eric McKee, Clenched Lap or Clinker
When I first conceived the idea of building Phoebe a boat, one particularly shaky fantasy sidebar to the whole bonkers enterprise envisaged me heading off into the woods, felling a tree and dragging it back to my lair. But this was before I knew much about anything to do with boatbuilding, including the all-important business of sourcing the right sort of timber for the job, and treating it in the proper way.
It’s Gus who, unwittingly, first disabuses me of this idea. He is, he tells me, always on the lookout for suitable timber and, whenever possible, gathers his own, heading out with tractor and trailer when he gets a call from a tree surgeon friend who finds a fallen oak or is obliged to fell one.
When he sees me perk up at this, Gus immediately adds, ‘But don’t do that.’ It isn’t just that such windfalls are few and far between, or that there are no tree surgeons on my Christmas-card list. It’s the next part of the process as he describes it that helps me to understand that starting from scratch, as it were, with a freshly felled tree trunk is a whole project all on its own, and one that will take as long as actually building the boat.
Gus has his own sawmill, which is the first requirement for anyone planning to convert a tree into planks. The other indispensable ingredient is time – and plenty of it. Gus also has this because for him boatbuilding and repair, as for Fabian, is not a one-off departure from the norm, but an everyday, ongoing process. Timber he prepares today will serve its purpose a year or two, or even more, down the line. Likewise, a boat he is working on today could well be the beneficiary of timber that first came into his possession years ago. Preparing freshly felled timber for use in boatbuilding, in other words, is a very long game.
Once a log has been sawn into planks it has to be dried, which can be done in a kiln, if you have one, but is traditionally and more usually done by stacking the planks, separated by timber sticks, and letting airflow do its thing – a process that on average takes a year for every inch of thickness.
A year!
Trees contain an awful lot of water – up to 540 litres for every cubic metre, I learn from a handy guide to timber drying produced by the Chilterns Conservation Board. This water starts to evaporate immediately from felled timber through newly exposed surfaces, a process that speeds up as trunks are cut into planks and more surfaces become exposed.
Monitoring this vapour loss, and knowing when the timber is ready to be used, calls for an understanding of the process at a cellular level. Water in timber is held in cell cavities, where it is known as ‘free’ water, and in cell walls, as ‘bound’ water. The free water, which accounts for between 25 and 30 per cent of the moisture content, is the first to be lost to evaporation as cut timber is dried. When that’s gone, when the so-called ‘fibre saturation point’ has been reached, the timber starts to lose its bound-water content from the cell walls.
And this is when shrinkage – and possible damage – begins.
Just how much a plank of wood will shrink during this stage of drying depends on the type of timber and its final water content – and on how the plank has been cut from the log. The easiest way to cut a tree trunk into planks – and the cheapest if somebody else is doing it for you – is to lay it on its side and feed it repeatedly through the sawmill, slicing off one plank at a time. This is known as ‘through and through conversion’. The boards produced by this method are mainly ‘tangential’, which means they are cut above or below the heart of the tree, but some are also ‘radial’, or cut in line with the heart. Which is which is important to the boatbuilder, because the two types of plank are more or less susceptible to shrinkage and the damage it can cause.
A radially cut plank of English oak, says my guide, will shrink across its width by about 4 per cent. Cut tangentially, however, and the shrinkage increases to 7.5 per cent. The worst-performing timber in this respect seems to be beech, which can lose almost 10 per cent of its width.
The potential effect of this shrinkage – especially if drying is mismanaged, as well it might be by a complete beginner – is as varied as it’s unpredictable. But if a plank is still drying out when it goes on a boat, it can split, warp, crack, twist and cup, none of which is an exactly desirable feature.
In short, not only is there no point in starting out with a freshly felled tree, even if I can find one, but it would also cost me time I don’t have and almost certainly end in disaster.
Gus’s advice is that, as I have neither the time nor the experience to succ
essfully navigate all the potential forestry pitfalls, I should avoid all of this and concentrate on building a boat, which is, after all, the whole point of the exercise on which I am embarking. Am I also planning to master the skills necessary to manufacture paints, glues, epoxy resins, or to make my own saws, chisels and planes? No, I am not. Instead, he suggests, I should rely on a timber merchant with a long record of supplying traditional boatbuilders. These days, they’re few and far between. When the winter storms have been too tame to trouble the oaks on the Shotley Peninsula, Gus makes the 360-mile round trip to Robbins Timber, a company in Bristol docks that has specialised in marine woods since 1750.
But, in the end, a road trip from the east coast of England to the west proves thankfully unnecessary – I find a supply of suitable timber that has been sawn and seasoned and is ready to be converted into hull planks right on my own doorstep, in Fabian’s yard in Rowhedge.
Like any boatbuilder, Fabian keeps a stock of seasoned timber, built up over the years on the basis that he never knows when it might come in handy because, sooner or later, it always does. Part of Fabian’s role as the boatbuilding instructor at the Nottage Institute in Wivenhoe is to supply the timber. Most of the dinghies that have been made there, and at least two of the larger boats Fabian has designed and built for clients, have had their hulls made of larch, so unsurprisingly Fabian has quite a bit of the stuff on hand – and, equally importantly, is prepared to sell me some of it.
Larch, it’s fair to say, doesn’t feature in any of the medieval boats or ships unearthed either in Britain or Scandinavia by archaeologists. Almost every one was oak through and through, but that’s down to the fact that oak was wildly plentiful in northern Europe for centuries and using any other kind of timber would have been a perverse departure from a well-proven norm. Larch, on the other hand, a native of southern European highlands, was unknown in Britain until the seventeenth century and not widely grown until the eighteenth.
Timber Trees, a book published in 1829 by the London-based Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sings the praises of larch as ‘being proof, not only against water, but against fire . . . before a larch beam be even completely charred on the surface, a beam of pine, or of dry oak, will be in a blaze beyond the ordinary means of extinguishment’. The durability of the timber, according to the enthusiastic anonymous author, was attested to by its use in the great Venetian palaces, where some beams ‘are said to be 120ft long [and] show no symptoms of decay’. What’s more, ‘the complete preservation of some of the finest paintings of the great masters of Italy is, in some respects, owing to the panels of larch on which they are executed’.
Well that should, at least, make painting Phoebe’s boat a doddle, if not a masterpiece.
Proven over the past thirty years as the timber of choice for dozens of Nottage dinghies, using larch for the Swift makes sense from every perspective, as does sourcing it direct from Fabian, who knows the demands and vagaries of every strake on the design.
Buying unprocessed tree trunks is a gamble, and all the risk was taken by Fabian when he first acquired this timber. It has been plank-sawn to his requirements – which are now also mine – and has been properly seasoned. Furthermore, any flaws will be immediately obvious, even to me, and easily avoided by judicious sawing, which will take place before my eyes. The price we agree – £50 per strake – comes to £1,000 for all twenty strakes on the boat. It sounds expensive, but actually it’s a complete bargain. This timber represents an investment to Fabian, who selected it, dried it and stored it at his own risk, and who now is not only passing it on to me, free of risk, but is even prepared to rough-shape each plank to the approximate dimensions required for the Nottage.
Because the Nottage has been the boat of choice for the Wivenhoe boatbuilding school for the best part of thirty years, plywood templates exist for each of the ten strakes on either side of the hull and these will be used to mark up the timber for rough-cutting. This does not mean that I am in a plug-and-play scenario planking-wise, because each plank will need to be fine-tuned as it goes onto the boat, but it does save me an awful lot of preparation.
Just how much becomes apparent when I join Fabian at Rowhedge to get out a couple of the planks from his stock, a process that proves to be highly labour-intensive. It starts by selecting suitable candidates from the storage rack, setting them up on a couple of trestles and trying on the templates for size. Strake seven is relatively easy. It’s the straightest on the boat, which means it can consist of a single plank rather than two that will have to be joined together, and so it’s not hard to find a piece of timber that will accommodate the template.
Strake six, on the other hand, is another story. Because of the banana-shaped curve at its back end, where it will sweep up to meet the transom, it’s hard to find planking stock wide enough to get it out in one piece. Even if a sufficiently wide tree could be found, to do so would be wasteful, as cutting out the banana shape would leave behind a lot of wood too short and too narrow to be of much use.
Consequently, the sixth strake on the boat, along with seven others of the ten, will be made up from two separate planks, which will have to be joined on the boat – one of many technical challenges ahead of me. The front half of the strake is relatively straight, and so presents few problems, but it proves a struggle to find a piece of stock capable of handling the curve in the aft template.
The finished strake will be no more than 6in across at its widest point and the stock plank is about 18in wide. But no matter how the template is positioned on it, at one end or the other we are left with the grain running out of the edge of the plank, which will leave it prone to splitting on the boat. The useful width of the plank is also limited by the existence at the edges of sapwood. This is the outer rings of a tree, the part just under the bark that was still growing when it was cut down and is infused with sap. It’s not as durable as the older, internal wood – found in the central part of this plank – and is more susceptible to rotting. Throw in the odd knot in the middle and it’s time to move on to the next candidate.
It’s not lost on me that if I’d bought this piece of timber myself, I’d be stuck with it – and shopping for another piece. Sooner or later Fabian will find a use for it. For me it would simply have become a very expensive piece of firewood. In the end, it takes the best part of an hour to find sufficient suitable stock for the six planks that will make up the four strakes I’ve come for today.
Crucially for the story I hope to tell Phoebe with this boat, these planks have a pedigree and connections that emphasise the continuity of the tradition with which I’m flirting.
Most of the larch I will use for planking came from the Longleat estate on the Wiltshire–Somerset border and is left over from a boat Fabian designed and built for a client in 2005, but a small number have a compelling back story. These planks, which have been in Fabian’s possession for about ten years, started out as larch trees grown on the Welsh border and were supplied by Dick Murphy, a man who ran a sawmill near Orford, a Suffolk village on the River Alde. In about 2004, some of the timber was used in the restoration of an historic lifeboat that had served the nearby seaside town of Southwold from 1893 to 1918.
But most of the share of the timber that came into Fabian’s possession was used to bring to life a boat conceived over 100 years ago by Albert Strange, a prototypical Victorian renaissance man. Artist, writer, sailor and yacht designer, Strange, who lived from 1855 to 1917, ‘combined the artistic, the practical, the adventurous and the gregarious, in a way rarely found today’, in the words of an association set up ‘to trace and preserve [his] designs and little ships’.
In 1899, Strange designed the Wenda, a 24ft canoe yacht. As far as anyone knows she was never built in Strange’s lifetime and, with the full plans apparently lost, for decades the only trace of his forty-fifth design was to be found in the pages of an obscure book on sailing published in 1901. For eighty years, the boat was nothing more than the ghost of an ide
a. But a brief description of the Wenda in The Sailing Boat: A Treatise on Sailing Boats and Small Yachts, by Henry Coleman Folkard, included just enough in the way of dimensions and sail and body plans to allow the renowned American boat designer Phil Bolger to work up a complete set of drawings, which he did for WoodenBoat magazine in the mid-’80s.
Bolger’s take on the Wenda finally came to life in the hands of Fabian Bush, who in 2003 was commissioned to build her from the American’s plans by a British Albert Strange enthusiast.
On Saturday, 8 July 2006, Strange’s Wenda, christened Constance by her owner, was finally launched, slipping into the River Colne and closing a circle begun 106 years earlier.
So larch it is for the hull, and here in the shed is a slightly imposing heap of seasoned, honey-coloured planks, steeped in history, just daring me to turn them into a boat. But they will have to wait. Before I can even start to think about planking I will have to create the all-important backbone of the boat – and for that, only one timber will do.
Tough, durable and heavy, oak has always played a central part in north European boatbuilding but it is in England – where the timber is associated in the public imagination with the glory days of Britain’s domination of the seas during the age of sail, and with keystones of nationhood such as HMS Victory and the battle of Trafalgar – that oak has transcended mere practical considerations to become an integral part of the national psyche.
‘Heart of Oak’, the march of the Royal Navy – ‘Heart of Oak are our ships, Jolly Tars are our men’ – was first performed in 1760. But alternative lyrics written in 1809 showed that at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, in the years immediately following Nelson’s victory over the French at Trafalgar, the tree that once covered vast swathes of the country had been elevated to an almost mystical status: ‘When Alfred, our King, drove the Dane from this land/ He planted an oak with his own royal hand/And he pray’d for Heaven’s blessing to hallow the tree/As a sceptre for England, the queen of the sea.’
How to Build a Boat Page 10