How to Build a Boat

by Jonathan Gornall

  I have to read his message through several times, with the plans and the stem to hand, before I fully understand what he’s saying and, when I finally do, the shocking truth hits me. Incredibly, I have somehow got it right. Impossibly, all my measurements are correct. The only thing I’ve failed to appreciate is that the boxes I have drawn onto the plan of the stem simply have to be rotated, in the imagination and the real world, through 90 degrees, for all the measurements to make perfect sense.

  So simple, when you know how. But I’ve surprised myself. I’ve always thought of maths and geometry and associated trials as particularly cruel and unusual forms of punishment.

  Solving the rebate conundrum is merely the overture to the real job at hand. With the lines transferred from paper to the stem, I embark on the lengthy and painstaking process of chopping out the rebate with mallet and chisel. Following Fabian’s advice, I carve out a series of separate 2in-wide sections from top to bottom of the stem before linking them up – there’s less chance of going off-piste that way.

  Aside from having cut out the stem shape, this really is my first bit of actual boatbuilding woodwork and, after some initial hesitation based on a not-unreasonable fear of destroying the whole thing with an ill-judged blow, I really start to enjoy myself. Yes, it’s slow-going; it takes me an entire week, working on and off, to chisel out the rebate on both sides of the stem, but that’s part of the pleasure and I can see that it’s going to be time well spent. Over the week I grow in confidence with the chisel and start to learn a little about the vagaries of wood grain.

  As the stem curves, so the blade meets the grain at varying angles and I learn to proceed cautiously, but not always cautiously enough; at one point a single overenthusiastic tap with the mallet sends a chunk of wood from the wrong side of the rebate line flying across the shed. But no matter; later, I will patch the gash with a carefully shaped and grain-aligned offcut and some glue – a kind of make-do-and-mend triumph in itself.

  I also come to appreciate fully the truth of John and Fabian’s maxim that every day should begin with a tool-sharpening session, and I have acquired two pieces of kit to comply with this advice. The first is an electric bench-mounted grinder, which if used incorrectly, as I discover, can reduce a perfectly sound chisel to a mangled stump of its former self in no time at all. Through trial and error, and some studying of the Collins Complete Woodworker’s Manual, I also learn that it is necessary to cool a blade down with a dip in a pot of water every few seconds, otherwise it will turn blue and ‘lose its temper’. The trick, it seems, is to move the blade constantly from side to side, but this takes some practice before it can be achieved without rounding off the cutting edge. Luckily I bought a set of cheap chisels and, in a shower of sparks, happily work my way through half of them before I more or less get the hang of it.

  The real workhorse of my daily sharpening routine, however, is the old oilstone gifted to me by John Lane. An oilstone is what it sounds like – an abrasive stone, which must be lubricated with a light machine oil. There’s an art to using it, of course, which Fabian has demonstrated. It’s all about keeping the cutting-edge bevel flat to the surface at all times while you move the blade in a figure-of-eight pattern – easier said than done. The rectangular stone, manufactured by the Carborundum Company in Manchester, England, was still in its original box, which carried the following instruction: ‘Chisels, plane-irons etc. should be sharpened at an angle of 30 degrees. When sharpening, it is important to maintain the same angle throughout the particular operation as to vary it or to use a rocking motion would prevent the securing of a true edge.’

  That about covers it, and the payback from a few minutes of sharpening a chisel or the blade (or ‘iron’) of a plane is astonishing – it’s the difference between fighting the wood and working with it. A plane with a correctly sharpened blade, protruding just the right amount from the sole, quite literally sings as it goes about its work. If the blade is even slightly blunt, or protruding too far, the whole process is reduced to a miserable, juddering ordeal, with every chance of splintering wood and sanity.

  In short, I feel I’m beginning to commune with the timber. I’m not sure it’s mutual. Who knew that working with oak could bring your hands out in an ugly red rash? But that’s a small price to pay.

  Seen from further along the tunnel, these seven difficult but rewarding days will often feel like the good times, an innocent, optimistic period to be gazed back upon fondly. For now, though, I feel like I imagine sculptors do when they lay into a fresh block of wood with hammer and chisel, and I am revelling in my new, prematurely self-awarded status as a craftsperson. A couple of times I even catch myself whistling as I work – and I never whistle.

  Late one afternoon, with the stem all but complete, I put it in my backpack, sticking out the top, and cycle it home to show Kate and Phoebe. The ride home, along lanes cutting through fields and small stands of trees, is a joy. It’s still only mid-February but after frosty starts and sub-zero temperatures in January – the coldest the county has seen for more than four years – the sun has returned, determined to kick-start spring. In fact, this morning I took one look out of my east-facing office window and decided it was time to ditch the jeans for shorts and was rewarded with a day in which the temperature never dropped below 10 degrees centigrade.

  Now, cycling home, past trees and bushes tentatively offering buds, I’m rewarded with something else – the unexpected sight of a large, rangy hare, tempted out of hiding by the unseasonably warm weather and loping down the lane ahead of me. It’s a little too early for March madness, but nevertheless it decides to challenge the human on wheels to a race, and I’m up for it. We fly along in loose formation for perhaps 100 yards before it grows bored and, with a mighty kick of its powerful hind legs, bounds off down a track into a field.

  I slow down, breathless but happy, basking in the last rays of the sun and the sense that I have been smiled upon. Some authorities maintain that the hare was introduced to Britain from across the North Sea, and that in Norse mythology the animal was associated with the goddess Freyja (holder of a mixed portfolio including love, sex, beauty, war and death). Whatever the truth, I’m happy to believe that the first hares arrived on these shores as livestock on board a clinker-built longship, in which case it seems wholly reasonable that it is the sight of my humble yet totemic stem that has persuaded this one to break cover.

  Whatever the hare thinks of my efforts, Kate is pleasantly surprised – though of course her expectations are, justifiably, pretty low. Phoebe seems less impressed, although, as I have to keep reminding myself, she is still not quite three years old. Nevertheless, she shows an intelligent interest in the stem, for about as long as any toddler can be expected to.

  ‘What is it, Daddy?’ she asks, reaching up tentatively to touch it as I pull it out of the backpack.

  ‘It’s the front bit of your boat,’ I say, kicking off my shoes and clambering up onto the sofa, behind which Red Boat hangs in its frame. I hold the stem up in front of the big woodcut. ‘See? It’s this bit – it’s called the stem. What do you think?’

  Phoebe bounds up onto the sofa alongside me. She stares hard at the stem for a moment, frowning and seemingly baffled by the sudden three-dimensional manifestation of something she has known since the day she was born in only two-dimensional terms. Finally, ‘It’s ridickerous,’ she announces, laughing and bouncing off the sofa. Phoebe’s Tigger-inspired approximation of ‘ridiculous’ is usually deployed, we’ve noticed, when she’s put on the spot over something she doesn’t quite understand. But I know exactly what she means. The whole thing is ridickerous, after all.

  Kate takes the stem from me and looks at it closely, turning it over and squinting at details, like an antiquarian examining a rare piece. I’m braced for a quip but disarmingly all she says is, ‘You know, this really is quite impressive. Well done, you.’

  ‘Um, thanks,’ I say, retrieving the artefact and flopping down on the sofa with it on my
lap. ‘There’s still quite a bit to do,’ I add, unnecessarily. Kate laughs. ‘Yes, I can see that,’ she says.

  Ridickerous or not, at this moment at least, Daddy is starting to feel just a little like someone who knows what he’s doing. It’s an illusion, of course. I’d dreaded tackling the stem because it seemed like the toughest task I would face. In fact, it will pale into insignificance alongside what lies ahead. But as I sit on the sofa, cradling this sculpted piece of oak in my arms and watching my laughing, tireless daughter sprinting from one end of the room to the other and, quite literally, bouncing off the walls with unrestrained joy, all things seem possible.

  12

  A JIGSAW PUZZLE

  ‘Boatbuilding proper commences with working the centreline, and here it should be remembered that the commonest faults in amateurs are their impatience and neglect to completely finish each part as building proceeds.’

  – John Leather, Clinker Boatbuilding

  16 FEBRUARY 2017

  As proud as I am of the stem, I am also keenly aware that it is only one of six pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is the backbone – or ‘centreline’, in the parlance – of the boat. The centreline is the spine of a boat, around which all the other parts will be assembled. It follows, therefore, that it must be both strong and true.

  On a still strangely mild February morning I make myself a cup of coffee, sit down at my ‘desk’ – a cheap door laid flat and clamped at either end to a Workmate – and spread out the plans. Gazing at the 1:5 scale construction drawings, with their various cutaway views of the boat, reminds me of exactly how much work is ahead. There’s the treasured stem, clear enough, on which until now my attention has been focused in close-up, but seeing it again in context has a disturbingly dizzying effect, not unlike the dolly-zoom beach shot in Jaws.

  At this point, by considering the whole it would be easy to become overwhelmed, and so I fall back on a trick picked up in my marathon-running days – forget the absurdly distant finishing line, and on no account consider even one of all the miles that lie between you and it. Focus instead on successfully putting one foot in front of the other.

  The first thing, then, is to concentrate solely on the centreline while pushing the vastness of the rest of the task into the background. To assist this mind game I take a pencil and lightly shade in the six parts, which has the effect of throwing them into sharper focus than the rest.

  (A note on pencils. I bought several dozen bright-yellow HB pencils on the grounds that they would be easy to spot in a workshop covered with sawdust and wood shavings, and that no matter how many I absentmindedly dropped there would always be another one within reach. Already most have disappeared – pencils, it turns out, are the errant single sock of woodworking. The best place for a pencil, as boatbuilders and carpenters have always known, and as I eventually discover, is behind the ear.)

  Now the way ahead is clearer. The stem’s connected to the keel, which in turn is connected to the sternpost rising up at the back of the boat. The sternpost is inclined slightly backwards and in the angle between it and the keel lies the ‘deadwood’, a gently curving wedge that will define the rise of the hull at the stern. Along the entire length of the keel, and bending up at the stern to follow the rising curve of the dead-wood, lies the ‘hog’, a piece of wood shallower but wider than the keel. Seen from ahead or behind, keel and hog together form a T-shape. In addition to giving the keel extra strength, the hog serves as a ledge under which the first two planks of the hull will later be fixed.

  There is one more component part to the centreline: the stem ‘knee’, a ski-jump-shaped block of wood, about a foot long, which bridges the angle between the hog and the stem at the front, strengthening the joint between the stem and the keel. The hog is to be glued to the keel. As well as being glued, all four components at the front of the centreline – the stem, stem knee, hog and keel – will also be held together with four long bolts. More glue, and four more bolts, will hold the sternpost, keel, deadwood and hog together at the back end of the boat.

  Almost every part of this little boat has a heritage that can be traced back to the very earliest days of the Nordic clinker tradition, but the hog-on-keel arrangement is a little different, dating back, as far as anyone knows, ‘only’ as far as about AD 400. In fact, its appearance marked a major technological breakthrough, which probably did more to disseminate the genes of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings than any other factor. The T-shaped keel was first seen by archaeologists on a vessel unearthed alongside the more famous Nydam boat in southern Denmark between 1859 and 1863. Sadly, its smaller sister, thought to have been about 62ft long, no longer exists – during the 1864 war between Germany and Denmark, the invading army chopped it up for firewood. But the records left by contemporary Danish archaeologists show that the lost vessel had something its more famous sibling did not – a proper, T-shaped keel.

  The bigger boat had only what is known as a keel plank – a hog, in essence, sans keel, below which the first planks of the hull are fixed. This, as a paper in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration in 1982 explained, meant it was not strong enough to take a mast or sail and could only be rowed. The development of a deep keel beneath the hog plank meant ships could mount a mast and harness the power of the wind to travel faster, and further afield.

  As tempting as it is to simply sit and contemplate the vibrant sense of time-spanning continuity of which every piece of timber in my charge seems to be possessed, appreciation of historical resonance must give way to practical concerns – and the most pressing of these is how to extract the keel from the great chunk of rough-cut oak, about 10ft long, that has been awaiting my attention.

  According to the Nottage brief, which Fabian prepared for his students and has shared with me, the keel must be ‘trued up’ until its top and bottom surfaces are both straight and parallel to each other. I refer to the plans, which are quite clear: the keel must be 50mm deep and 70mm wide. Deep and wide – two words with unambiguous meaning that even my yet-to-turn-three-year-old daughter has mastered. Yet, for some reason, my mind keeps switching the two propositions. Surely a keel has to be deeper than it is wide?

  It seems incredible, but this simple ‘problem’ flummoxes me for a couple of days, during which I circle the beast waving steel rule, set square and spirit level ineffectually, pausing only to question my sanity and pull out what’s left of my hair. In my defence, my confusion is reinforced by the instruction to true-up the top and bottom faces of the keel. In fact, when I finally calm down and take a long hard look at it, the top and bottom surfaces of the keel are already flat and parallel and it’s the sides that are rough-cut and require treatment.

  Looking back, I think this might have something to do with the lack of three-dimensional problem-solving in my modern life. As a writer, I spend most of my time confronting the flat, two-dimensional world of a computer screen; small wonder, perhaps, that my brain fails to compute when confronted with a need to visualise in three dimensions information that is given in two.

  To avoid further confusion/stupidity, I mark the faces of the keel – ‘top’, ‘bottom’, ‘left’ and ‘right’. I suppose I ought to use ‘port’ and ‘starboard’, but right now I don’t feel entitled to use nautical terminology.

  So having determined that the top and the bottom are in fact square, what I have to do now is shape the actual sides of the keel – and that means my little friend the bandsaw will be coming out to play again.

  I have already used it to cut out the stem, but this will be its first serious outing: both sides of the 10ft-long keel will have to be manhandled through its jaws, while keeping the blade following a gently curving line. The thought is a little daunting – the timber is long, heavy and unwieldy – but there’s no getting around it. Trimming both sides of the keel using a handsaw and plane would take for ever, and that’s a little bit more time than I have to play with. Besides, I’ve spent £500 on the Record BS300E and if I don�
�t confront my fear of its clear potential for ripping off my arms there will be no boat. And, when the time comes to start cutting and shaping the planking, the bandsaw will be indispensable and in constant use – I need to man up and get comfortable with it.

  The plans call for the keel to be 70mm wide in the middle, where it sort of bulges out to accommodate the centreboard slot, but then it tapers gradually towards the front and rear ends. Boat designers deal in ‘half-breadths’, the lateral distance from the exact centre of the keel to any given point on the boat. These measurements are found on the plans in the ‘table of offsets’, which gives distances to various elements of the boat at seven equally spaced notional positions, or ‘stations’, along the length of the keel. Station one, for example, is at the front of the boat, just behind where the stem starts to rear up from the keel. The table tells me that at this station the half-breadth of the keel is 25mm, which means the whole width at this point is 50mm. After this, the keel balloons out to 70mm for the next five stations and then narrows back down again, to 60mm, by station seven, a foot or so forward of the sternpost. From there it narrows to a mere 35mm beneath the transom.

  To mark these widths at each station prior to trimming the keel it’s necessary first to find the exact centreline of the timber. Now I find out why Fabian included a chalk-line on my tools shopping list. This is a line of string that can be wound in and out of a container filled with chalk dust. The string is nailed to one end of the keel, at roughly the centre point. It’s then pulled taut at the other end of the keel and moved from side to side until the apparent centreline of the wood is established by sight. This is then checked by using a ruler to make sure there is enough wood either side of the line to make the required width at each station. When there is, ping the string and a neat chalk line is left along the length of the timber. Now the required widths can be marked at each station, measured out from this centreline, and a faired line between them created using the faithful bendy piece of curtain rail and a pencil (if you can find one). Then it’s bandsaw along the line on both sides of the keel and, hey presto, job done.