To my surprise, it goes like a dream. It’s a struggle manoeuvring the heavy length of wood – in the end I impress myself by inventing a rope sling, hung from a roof beam, to take the weight at one end while I carefully feed the other through the bandsaw. But the brand-new and consequently razor-sharp blade zips along the drawn lines quickly and accurately. By way of a bonus, I even manage to retain possession of all ten fingers. I’m not quite ready to completely trust the bandsaw just yet, but it’s a start.
My next challenge is to cut the mortise and tenon joints that will join the stem and the sternpost to the keel, and this will call for a handsaw and chisel. Compared with making the stem, cutting out the sternpost is a doddle – a simple length of square timber, rather than a complex curved shape, it too is drawn life-size on the plans and easy prey for Kate’s carbon-paper-and-pattern-wheel transfer technique. And, of course, unlike on the stem, there are no pesky rebates to be cut – at the back end of the boat the planks will land wide of the sternpost, on the transom.
The mortise and tenon is a classic, simple joint found in boatbuilding for thousands of years – its first known appearance was in a 144ft, 4,600-year-old ship buried in the sand alongside Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza and excavated in 1954 – but it and I have never crossed saws before.
The idea is to join two pieces of wood by creating a squared-off tongue, or tenon, at the end of one piece that will fit snugly into a slot or groove – the mortise – in the other. On the Nottage, the tenons are at the bottom ends of the stem and sternpost, and their receiving mortises are at either end of the keel. It’s obvious even to me that the two parts of the joint must not only fit together snugly but must also align precisely. The essential tool for achieving this happy state of affairs is a simple adjustable marking gauge and, on the face of it, it’s a pretty easy process that will doubtless be familiar to competent amateur woodworkers everywhere: set the correct width on the gauge, score lines on the face to be cut from both sides of the piece and saw out the tenon. Repeat the marking-up process for the mortise on the receiving piece of wood, and saw and chisel out the slot.
I think I have already established I am not any kind of woodworker, competent or otherwise, but I am actually enjoying this superficial excursion into the cabinet-maker’s art. Phoebe’s great-great-great-grandfather, carpenter Edwin Wilson Sleep Ismay, would, I think, be proud of me. Or maybe not. It’s only when I’ve finished cutting out the tenon on the stem – you know, the thing on which I have lavished so much blood, sweat and tears – that I realise that, instead of the 20mm width called for on the plans, I have somehow managed to make the tenon only a measly 10mm wide.
I freeze, as though not moving will somehow improve the situation, or at least not make it any worse. My temples pound as I confront the possibility that all my work on the stem has been for nought – that I will have to throw it away and start again. No. Impossible. I calm down and think it through. I have yet to cut the receiving mortise at the front end of the keel. Surely that, too, can be cut only 10mm wide, to accommodate my puny tenon? Would it matter? I have no idea, but as the joint is ultimately going to be glued I figure I can get away with it.
What was that annoying mantra I’d heard from John Lane, Fabian’s assistant at the Nottage? Ah yes: measure twice, cut once. Bearing this in mind I get it right when I cut the joint at the other end of the keel.
By now I am on something of a roll. Not a fast roll, but a roll nonetheless, and one heading mainly in the right direction. The next job is to create plywood templates from the 1:1 plan for the knee that braces the stem and the keel at the front of the boat and the deadwood that rises between the keel and the sternpost at the back, transfer them to two chunks of timber and cut them out on the bandsaw.
Shaping the deadwood, which fills the angle between the sternpost and the keel, is a simple matter of faithfully transferring the lines on the plan and using the bandsaw with some care. It’s important, but not difficult, to reproduce accurately the ski-jump slope of the top surface of the piece, which starts 4.5in up the inside face of the sternpost and swoops down to no thickness at all 2ft or so along the keel, where it blends into the top of the hog. The curve has to be fair: the hog, which lies flat on the keel until it meets the rising deadwood near the stern, must be able to bend and follow the curve up smoothly towards the sternpost.
The stem knee, however, which sits in the angle between the stem and the hog, serving to hold them together and strengthen the centreline structure, presents a new challenge. Hard up against the stem, the knee will be visible inside the finished boat and, as a consequence, the plans call for what to me seems to be some mighty fancy finishing. All it really means is that the two ends of the knee, where it meets the stem at the front and the hog at the back end, have to be rounded off, both for aesthetic appeal and because paint clings less efficiently to sharp edges. There will be more of this free-forming further down the road, when the time comes to fit-out the inside of the finished hull, but this is my first stab at working wood by eye – sculpting, if you will, without the safety net of a pencil line to follow.
I clamp the knee in a Workmate and, tentatively at first, go at it with the spokeshave, a 2in blade with a handle on either side that is drawn across the timber. It is the slightest, barely noticeable piece of woodworking, but gently carving the knee and rounding off its sharp edges gives me a buzz ridiculously out of proportion to the scale of the achievement.
A lot of maths and precision measuring is called for over the next few days – the sort of thing that normally would make my head ache. But, bizarrely, I seem to be warming to it. Again, there is whistling. By the end of it I am ready to assemble the centreline. To my delighted surprise, everything seems to fit together as it should. Now it’s time to get messy.
Gluing the centreline together on the workbench is a long process, partly because I proceed cautiously – there’s no going back once the glue has been deployed – and partly because each step takes a day, for the simple reason that the glue used in the previous step has to be left overnight to dry. First, it’s important to cover the workbench with a sheet of plastic. This glue is good stuff and it would be a serious departure from tradition to build a boat with a workbench irretrievably welded to it. The next step is to clamp the keel in place on the workbench so it is both absolutely upright and perfectly horizontal. Using clamps and experimenting with blocks and sliver-thin wooden wedges, this alone takes the best part of a day.
With the keel going nowhere and the stem and sternpost clamped to it but not yet permanently fixed in position, the first piece to glue in place is the deadwood. This is a bit of a moment – the first two pieces of the boat are about to be permanently joined together. And, if the deadwood is wonky, or slightly out of position, at best I will have to saw it off the keel, plane down any remaining stump and start over. But that turns out not to be necessary. I pay obsessive attention to making sure the sternpost is in the correct position, tilted backwards at the precise angle required and, when it is, the deadwood has nowhere else to go but in the right place. Because of the curved top surface of the deadwood, some inventive use of clamps and blocks of wood is required. When it’s all over and I leave the glue to set overnight, I feel the tension drain out of me as I cycle home.
As I retrace my route the following morning, I feel some of that tension jumping back on board. But when I get to the shed and remove the clamps I’m thrilled to see the keel and the deadwood have become one. This actually looks like progress and I’m itching to show Phoebe. She’s at nursery today, but I message Kate in the hope that they can swing by on their way home, but Phoebe already has a play date in her busy diary.
Next it’s the turn of the 9ft-long hog, which has to be glued in place on top of the keel and the deadwood.
The hog lies flat on the keel for most of its length. But the ski-jump rise of the deadwood towards the stern means the hog, a piece of oak 0.6in thick and almost 5in wide, must be persuaded to bend upwards to f
ollow the sweeping curve. It could easily snap, but as the clamps go on progressively it takes the contortion without a whimper.
Finally, it’s time to commit the stem and sternpost. Both pieces now end in tenons that slot rather neatly, if I say so myself, into the mortises cut at either end of the keel. In fact, so snug is the fit that the dry joints alone are sufficient to hold them in place for inspection purposes. Gluing them permanently into that place, however, is the trickiest and most crucial part of building the centreline, in which imaginative clamping will play a central role. Fabian, John Lane and Gus have all stressed that a boatbuilder can’t have enough ways of clamping two pieces together, and now I can see why.
Not only must the stem and the sternpost be precisely aligned vertically, but they must also be an exact distance apart at their top ends. If they aren’t, it means that either the transom at the back of the boat, or the stem at the front – or both – will be at the wrong angle, which in turn could spoil the shape of the carefully designed hull.
And this is where the confusingly named ‘base line’ comes into the picture.
On the plans the base line is a notional horizontal position line that runs the length of the boat. In theory it could be drawn anywhere, but on the Nottage plans it’s drawn across the top of the boat. So why, then, is it called the base line? Because, for reasons I’m still a little hazy about, once the centreline is complete and the moulds that will shape the planking have been fitted, the whole assembly will be given legs and turned upside down. And at this point the base line will, finally, be at the bottom of the structure, as its name kind of implies it ought to have been all along.
As the plans make clear, the main role of the base line is to serve as a horizontal reference line, from which a series of measurements are given in the offsets tables, expressed as ‘heights from base’. For example, the position of the top edge of each of the ten strakes that will be fitted to either side of the boat is expressed as a different height from this base line at each of the moulds. At mould four, for instance, the top of plank six must be exactly 557mm from the base line.
Clearly, then, it’s important to position the 4×2-inch pine beam, or ‘base board’, that will now become the physical manifestation of the base line, at precisely the correct height where it meets the stem at the front of the boat and the sternpost at the rear. The underside face of this base board equates to the base line. If it is positioned too high, or too low – or, God forbid, anything other than perfectly level – then none of the measurements given in the offsets table for the rest of the components in the boat will be correct. Here, the waterlines come into it again, as an aid to precise positioning.
There is much checking and double-checking to be carried out – the height from the base line to this waterline or that, or to the top of the hog. It is also vital to ensure that the exact positions of the mould stations, marked on the hog, are mirrored precisely on the base line above, thus ensuring that when fitted the moulds will be not only square to the keel but also perfectly vertical.
One other measurement must be factored in simultaneously. The distance along the underside of the base board between the aft face of the stem, and the forward face of the sternpost, must be precisely 2,870mm.
It takes me hours of fiddling and cursing to get all this right. Eventually, I’ve done what I can. The base board, duly marked up, is screwed firmly to the stem and sternpost. It looks okay and the completed centreline and the base board are as one.
It remains only to glue and clamp in place the bottom ends of the stem and sternpost and then the last two parts of the centreline jigsaw puzzle are in place.
With perfect timing, Kate pulls up outside the open door in the Honda Jazz and lowers Phoebe’s window.
‘Hello Daddy,’ she calls out. ‘Where’s my boat?’
I open her door and unbuckle her harness. ‘Would you like to come in and see it?’
‘Yes!’ she shouts, and she’s off, leaping out of the car and storming into the shed. Kate’s hot on her heels, muttering something about a health-and-safety nightmare, and I guess it is – various lethally sharp tools lie here and there, well within reach, and the floor around the bandsaw is littered with sharp, jagged-edged slices of timber sawn off the keel. I haven’t really thought this through. Phoebe is at the workbench now, trying to figure out how to crush one of her hands in the vice.
‘Darling,’ I say, trying to divert her attention to the centreline construction, towering above her. ‘Look: I’ve finished the middle of your boat.’
She puts the self-harming on hold, while retaining her grip on the arm of the vice, and looks at the centreline. She frowns sceptically.
‘That’s not a boat,’ she says.
I point to the stem, which I’d brought home to show her.
‘Well, it’s going to be. Remember this bit? It’s like the bit in your picture, isn’t it?’
Suddenly, her eyes widen and she lets go of the vice.
‘Look, look!’ she shouts, pointing. I smile; she gets it. But no. She’s not pointing at the centreline, but past it. ‘A horsey!’
There is indeed a horsey, one of two that live in the field at the back of the shed, and it’s peering in over the fence and through the window. Phoebe, pursued closely by Mummy, heads for the door at speed to make its acquaintance.
Don’t worry, I tell myself. She will get it. Besides, my sense of achievement as I cycle home is, once again, out of all proportion to my . . . well, to hell with it, let’s say it out loud: my achievement.
But at the back of my mind I’m aware that all is not well . . . I started work on the stem on 2 February and it’s now 10 March. It’s taken me almost seven weeks to build the centreline, the spine of the boat. I know this is too slow – there is so much more to do and no obvious way of increasing the number of hours in each day. Night-times, however, I am coming to see as a significant untapped resource.
Kate works and Phoebe spends four days a week at nursery, days on which I make breakfast before seeing them off the premises at about 7.45am. If it’s a day without a pressing journalism deadline, I cycle to the shed by 8am and generally get back home at about 6pm, in time for dinner and bath or story-reading duties.
My journalism generally calls for interviews and now much of my time is spent persuading interviewees that these are better carried out by telephone. Normally I would jump at the chance of getting down to London or across to Cambridge for a face-to-face, but now every second is precious and even the thought of languishing on a train for an hour in each direction is anxiety-inducing. Instead, I’ve taken to conducting interviews in the shed with a digital voice recorder and my mobile phone on speaker, briefly downing the tools of my new job in favour of those of my old. It is, I notice, doing wonders for my interviewing technique. I have gone from a career-long leisurely interlocutory style, and the subsequent drag of having to transcribe recordings an hour or more in length, to developing a snappy, cut-to-the-chase technique.
Most of my research and actual writing, meanwhile, now takes place at night, after Phoebe has fallen asleep. Some nights, I might get as little as four hours of sleep – less, if Phoebe wakes and comes thundering into our room, clutching a selection of in-favour furry toys. In the wee small hours she prefers her mother’s company to mine and invariably does her best to kick me out of bed.
I don’t mind. I retreat upstairs to my office. Two more hours of writing time is not to be sneezed at.
But I’m not sure how long I can keep this up.
Clearly, there aren’t enough hours in a week and something is going to have to give. And it can’t be the Swift.
13
WONKY, BUT CLOSE ENOUGH
‘Measurements must be exact. Fits close. To tolerate less is fatal. Just as the surgeon demands complete asepsis in the operating room, so the competent boatbuilder strives for precise and errorless measurement and layout in the shop.’
– John Gardner, Building Classic Small Craft
11 MARCH 2017
Today is a big day. After a month of sawing, planing, chiselling, blundering, hacking, gluing and bleeding I have finally completed the all-important, six-part, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that is the centreline of the boat. Keel, deadwood, hog, sternpost, stem, stem knee . . . of these six components, a month ago I’d have recognised the name and grasped the function of only one, the keel. Now I see, and understand them all, in my dreams.
I arrive at the shed and early-morning sunshine is pouring in through the twin windows behind the workbench, illuminating my creation with suitably dramatic backlighting. Standing in the field outside, there are now two horses peering in through the window as though word of the miracle unfolding in the shed has got around the farm. With all the trepidation of a first-time surgeon removing the bandages from a patient after a risky, experimental cosmetic procedure, I unfasten the last clamps and pull away the plastic anti-glue sheeting from under the keel.
And there it is, sitting on the workbench, a thing of beauty and not a little wonder, six parts become one. The horses, apparently unimpressed, snort and drift away. Remarkably, I have made something with my own hands – and, of course, with the help of my little friend, the bandsaw (and some forbearance from Fabian) – and now here it is, sitting on the workbench like a challenging work of art. All it needs is a label, an absurd description and a fancy price ticket and I could be in the running for an Arts Council grant.
For the first time, I’m able to step back for a moment from the minutiae of plans and the continuous, brow-furrowing worries. Like a palaeontologist who has spent months with brush and trowel, painstakingly shifting tons of dirt an ounce at a time in search of a dinosaur whose existence has until this moment been nothing more than an unlikely theory, I am suddenly confronted with the reward of the skeleton that changes everything.
How to Build a Boat Page 14