How to Build a Boat

by Jonathan Gornall

  She might lack all flesh and three-dimensional form, but what I am now looking at with frank pride is without doubt the profile of an emerging boat, an actual real boat and an elegant beauty in the making, to boot. Ten feet from stem to stern, standing on the workbench she looks larger, more imposing – altogether more serious, than I expected. And I, Jonathan Gornall, woodworking dunce extraordinaire, have created this. Take that, gratuitously sarcastic school woodwork teacher.

  My self-congratulatory exuberance is interrupted by the sound of Fabian’s old car crunching to a halt outside the shed. He’s here to drop off some more timber and to cast an eye over my efforts so far. I look forward to Fabian’s visits, and not just because they punctuate my shed-bound solitude, or even because of that homemade cake. Watching him work and seeing his easy, practised way with tools and timber reminds me of the depth of the pool of tradition and expertise into which I am – presumptuously, absurdly – dipping a clumsy toe. The effect is not, however, to discourage me; I am only amazed that I am, slowly but surely, getting the hang of some of this stuff.

  Fabian and I have arranged that at each new stage of the project he’ll talk me through what I need to do next and that, when necessary, he will drive over from his workshop in Rowhedge to give me a masterclass at an agreed hourly rate. It’s a priceless education, but on these occasions both of us have to exercise discipline. Fabian, swift and efficient, is very capable of turning a quick demonstration into a full day’s work and, to my shame, I am equally capable of letting him. He could, of course, do everything much quicker and far better than me and it’s a joy to watch him work. In his hands, tools I’ve bought on the cheap and dismissed as useless junk come to life, worthless fiddles transformed into million-pound Stradivarii. Timber that resists my every blandishment, petulantly throwing up grain no matter which way I creep up on it with chisel or plane, becomes simperingly compliant under his touch. I am the very definition of the bad workman blaming his tools.

  But I have to keep reminding myself – and, occasionally, Fabian too – that this boat is mine to build and, should things depart drastically from plan, mine to screw up. He has, I notice, not forgotten the cake. Good. There will at least be elevenses. We exchange pleasantries and then it’s down to business.

  Fabian hangs a length of fine line, weighted with a screw, from a panel pin nailed into the marked centreline at the top of the stem. I do the same on the sternpost at the rear of the boat. When they stop swinging my heart skips a beat – it’s clear that something is amiss. There’s not much in it, but neither stem nor sternpost is quite vertical.

  I feel nauseous. I’m certain that the top of the keel – or, rather, the hog on top of it – is dead level, both side to side and end to end. So unless gravity has gone awry (and frankly I’m not pinning much hope on this possibility) this can only mean that somehow I have managed to muck up the mortise and tenon joints that attach stem and sternpost to the keel. The weird thing about this is not only that, if so, I have managed to get both wrong to almost exactly the same degree, which I don’t think I could have pulled off deliberately had I tried, but that the error has caused both components to lean towards the port side of the centreline. Maybe it is a gravity thing after all . . .

  Either way, no correction of the error is possible at this stage – everything is irretrievably glued together. I feel like a condemned man awaiting sentence as Fabian squats down at the front of the boat and squints along the length of the keel. Then he gets up, walks round and does the same at the stern. He says nothing for a disturbingly long thirty seconds or so, then straightens up and shakes his head.

  ‘I’m not sure how you managed that,’ he says, almost to himself. ‘It seemed fine when it was dry-fitted the other day.’

  Dry-fitting is when the finished components awaiting final fixing are assembled temporarily and held in place with screws or clamps to check everything is fitting correctly. I’d put a lot of effort into making sure everything sat true and was correctly aligned. Or so I’d thought.

  Fabian walks back to the stem, crouches down again and does some more squinting. I hover behind him, peering over his shoulder – the sorcerer’s inept apprentice, dumbly aping his better – and yes, even to me it’s painfully clear that the stem and the sternpost are neither dead vertical nor, come to that, quite in vertical agreement with each other. This means that the boat will be ever so slightly lopsided, and even a little twisted, along its length.

  ‘Well,’ Fabian says finally, ‘I suppose it’s not too bad. There are only a few millimetres in it – probably not something you’d notice. I think . . .’

  He’s about to pronounce. Breath is held. A final squint down the centreline . . .

  ‘I think I’d just live with that,’ he says.

  Thank God. Of course, we both know that Fabian wouldn’t live with it, partly because he wouldn’t have made such a basic cock-up in the first place. But I’m taking the half-hearted thumbs-up as a pure win, because the alternative – scrapping the entire centreline and starting all over again – is simply unthinkable. Quite apart from the cost of the timber, there’s my mental health to consider.

  Besides, I’m not pitching for absolute, concours d’élégance perfection here, and neither am I building a ‘class’ boat, designed to be raced against other identical boats and so judged ruthlessly for any hair’s-breadth inaccuracies. This is a boat in which a young girl is going to have fun mucking about on the water. As long as it floats and ends up looking and behaving even a little like a boat, it’ll do the job and I’ll have achieved far more than I could reasonably have hoped for.

  A few days later, I impose one final cock-up on the centreline, which stems from my inability to pay sufficiently close attention to the plans. It ought to be discouraging, but in a funny way it ends up boosting my confidence.

  The plan calls for four large bolts, each up to a foot long, to be run through the stem knee at the front of the boat, exiting through the stem and the keel. Four more will similarly secure the aft end of the centreline, passing through the hog and dead-wood, with two emerging through the sternpost and the other two through the aft end of the keel.

  I’ve been putting off this job, partly because it seems like an exercise in belts and braces – the centreline is already solidly held together with glue – but mainly because I’ve been dreading it. I can see how easy it would be to wander off target with the long and alarmingly flexible drill bit Fabian has lent me. It’s known, apparently, as an auger and I’m fairly certain it augurs ill. In the end, I come up with a creative solution that more or less works. Two narrow pieces of plywood, clamped as guides along pencil lines drawn on either side of the centreline, help me visually to centre the drill both vertically and horizontally. Ideally, all four holes would emerge in a straight line, precisely down the middle line of the timber. Mine exit either side of the line, but it’s close enough for jazz. Then I countersink both ends of each hole, so the nuts and washers will lie unseen beneath the surface of the wood.

  Except that’s not what the plans call for, as I would have noticed had I studied them with sufficient care. Yes, the holes along the outer edge of the centreline must be countersunk – later, they’ll be filled flush to the surface of the wood, prior to painting. But the nuts and washers on the inner ends of the bolts must remain proud of the wood, to allow a spanner to be used on them.

  Bugger.

  All eight rogue countersunk holes – four at the front, four at the back – have to be filled with glued-in wooden plugs, left to dry and then drilled through again. Off to Screwfix for a plug-cutting set. Needless to say, I’ve never done anything like this before, but after some trial runs on a matching piece of oak I have eight plugs and eight matching drilled-out holes to bang them into. A dollop of epoxy resin, a tap or two with the mallet and they’re firmly in place – I’ve even taken care to align the grain correctly, even though paint will eventually conceal this finicky detail (which will nevertheless perhaps impress some fu
ture marine archaeologist). The following day, when the epoxy resin has set, I cut them down flush with a chisel and a spokeshave, run the auger back out through the holes and the plugs and, by lunchtime, have all eight bolts tightened down.

  In all, a hugely satisfying waste of time.

  In erring, I have gained confidence. Not only have I somehow persuaded the six-part puzzle of the centreline to become as one, but in the process I have also made, met and mended a cock-up, and pretty much in my stride. I am discovering that this magical stuff that I am attempting to transform into a boat is, after all, only wood. It grows on trees! The splinters, I could do without. But this is not some alien material to be approached only in reverential awe and fear, but something benign and everyday that human beings have been exploiting and bending to their will for countless millennia.

  I’m sitting in the shed, contemplating the ever-so-slightly twisted yet nevertheless completed backbone of the boat, when Kate Reynolds, the ceramicist who works in one of the neighbouring outbuildings on the farm, pops across the yard to see how I’m getting on. ‘Wow,’ she says, clapping eyes on the boat for the first time since the centreline has taken shape, ‘it’s actually starting to look like a boat, isn’t it? It’s rather lovely.’

  I can’t help noticing that Kate has a large block of wood in her arms. She’s preparing for a show she has coming up and wants to mount some figures on square wooden plinths. Could she, by any chance, borrow my bandsaw?

  Of course she can – it’s the least I can do. Before I arrived at the farm all must have been peace and quiet. Now she and the neighbouring potter have their artistic meditations regularly interrupted by the sound of timber being sawn on a bandsaw at 820m per minute. She shows me how she wants the timber cut up and it takes me only a couple of minutes to produce three perfect blocks. There’s only one word for the way that this short little episode leaves me feeling – competent, at something that only a few months ago would have been entirely alien to me. And it’s a feeling I like, a lot.

  Before she leaves, Kate examines the creation on the workbench. ‘It really does have a presence, doesn’t it,’ she says. ‘A thing of beauty, in fact.’

  Praise indeed, from an actual artist and, I think, she’s right on both counts. It is starting to look like a boat and it does have a certain elegant presence. But this is, of course, very much a work in progress and now, before I can progress any further, I have to make the moulds. Kate leaves with her blocks, reality returns and I consult the plans.

  A mould is a temporary, disposable template that mimics a transverse section of a boat at any given point along its length – think the salami-sliced image of a human body created by an MRI scan. I have three moulds to create from the half-profile life-size drawings on the plan. Positioned at fixed intervals, or stations, along the centreline, the moulds give the planking something to bend around and so define the shape of the hull.

  Back in September, before I had even the slightest idea of what was involved in building a traditional wooden boat, I had merely nodded dumbly when Gus at Harry King’s had shown me the solitary half-mould his predecessor, Sam King, had used when he was building boats like the one I was now tackling. I mean, I’d appreciated that what I was seeing was a piece of eighty-year-old boatbuilding history, and I’d enjoyed the frisson of excitement at handling it, but now I understand the exact purpose of a mould I can’t begin to imagine how anyone could build a clinker boat with only half of one mould.

  In fact, it’s quite possible that the original builders eschewed moulds altogether. No one knows exactly how long boat-builders have been using moulds to create clinker boats, but there is no evidence to suggest that the earliest practitioners did so. In fact, the first known reference to the practice is found in a Swedish book on shipbuilding published as late as 1691. One illustration in Skeps Byggerij eller Adelig Öfnings (Shipbuilding or the Noble Exercise) clearly shows a small clinker boat being built around five moulds.

  Clinker is rooted in the Nordic tradition, and experts believe Viking shipbuilders didn’t bother with moulds. The Norwegian archaeologists who unearthed the first Viking ships concluded they must have done, because to them it had seemed inconceivable that such a complex and symmetrical hull shape could have been constructed without the aid of temporary moulds. It wasn’t until the 1960s that archaeologists began to question this assumption, for which no evidence had ever been found. Ole Crumlin-Pedersen, the leading Danish nautical archaeologist of his day, suggested instead that the boatbuilder, ‘as a sculptor, shaped the planks for the hull individually and fitted these without support or guidance from moulds or frames’. Instead, ‘he would rely on a trained eye and simple control levels to give the plank shell of the boat the exact shape he wanted’. Citing clinker construction methods that were in use until relatively recently in western Norway, he wrote in a paper in 2004 that the curvature of the shell ‘would be “frozen” by sticks connecting critical parts of the planking to the floor and the roof of the builder’s shop, until frames had been cut to fit the shape of the planking and had been fastened at regular intervals’.

  Well, blimey, is all I can say. Whatever the Vikings or Sam King did, thankfully the Nottage plan allows for the use of three moulds. With life-size half-drawings of all three, this is another job for the successful carbon-paper-and-pattern-wheel technique. This time, no templates are necessary. I can simply place the carbon paper directly onto the MDF from which the moulds will be cut, tape the plan down on top of that and roll away with my little wheel.

  This is, of course, slightly more complicated than reproducing the stem shape. The stem was shown whole on the plans, whereas for reasons of space only half of each mould is given. It makes sense – the moulds are perfectly symmetrical, so why draw both sides? But you still have to figure out a way of creating a whole mould formed of two halves.

  It takes a bit of blundering about, but I get there eventually. First I hit on the bright idea of clamping two sheets of MDF together, transferring the half-drawing to the top sheet and cutting out both at once with the jigsaw. Maybe it’s the quality of the jigsaw blades I’ve bought – I admit it, I went cheap – or maybe it’s operator error. A bit of both, probably. But when I finish sawing out my first two-in-one mould and triumphantly flip one side over to join it to the other, I realise that the jigsaw blade has not cut through the MDF perfectly vertically, but at an angle. What this means is that instead of the desired symmetry, at any given point around the leading edge of the mould – the edge against which the planks will lie – there is a significant variation in the width of the two halves as measured from the centreline where they meet.

  I already have a slightly off-centre stem and sternpost and I can’t knowingly let another compounding inaccuracy slip by me. It’s a little bit heartbreaking, but I have to accept that I’ve just spent the best part of four hours a) learning another lesson, and b) lovingly crafting so much firewood.

  About three hours later, I finally get it right. After a few experiments on scraps of MDF I realise I am never going to get the jigsaw blade cutting in a perfectly vertical line through two thick boards clamped together – it’s ridiculously easy to accidentally exert too much sideways pressure. So I abandon this so-called ‘short cut’ and painstakingly trace the outline of the half-mould onto two separate pieces of MDF, and then cut them both out individually.

  It takes twice the time, of course, but sawing through only 18mm of board, as opposed to 36mm, makes it much easier to keep the blade straight. I also learn that it is important not to push too hard, and to let the blade do the work. Of course, had I bothered to read the relevant section in the Collins Complete Woodworker’s Manual, which John Lane had commended to me, I’d have known this. ‘Push the saw through the work at a steady rate,’ it advises, ‘but do not force it.’

  Finally, with the hopefully mirror-image halves butted together, I screw down the three battens that will join the two pieces and measure out from the centreline on both halves. Symm
etrical. Phew. But symmetry alone isn’t enough. Have I got the overall width correct at the top of the mould? It is this, after all, that will define the beam, or width, of the boat at the top edge of the top plank, also known as the ‘sheer’. Nervously, I consult the table of offsets, which gives ‘half-breadths’ from the centreline. I’ve started on the biggest mould of all, which will sit amidships at station number four on the keel, almost the widest part of the boat. The half-breadth at this position for the widest part of the mould, at its top, is given as 660mm – and triumph! That is exactly the width of my conjoined mould at that point. I have even remembered to mark on the reference waterlines and the ‘sheer’ line. The position of this varies slightly but crucially from mould to mould, and defines the graceful sweep of the upper edge of the top plank of the boat along its length.

  I admit, a little bit of dancing takes place – nothing you’d want to be seen in public, of course, but a necessary burst of physical celebration after hours of bent-double concentration.

  It’s about then that I notice that at some point during the day I’ve received an email from Fabian and my heart sinks as I read it. ‘I think you’ll need a fourth mould,’ he’s written. The plans call for only three moulds, at stations two, four and six, but on reflection he now feels I should also make a mould to go at station one, which is situated just behind the stem. ‘We don’t do this at the Nottage,’ he adds, ‘but that’s because we have instructors on hand to check the emerging shape – working on your own you will need a mould here to keep control of the shape of the boat at the bow.’

  Basically, it’s a vote of no-confidence in my yet-to-be-tested planking skills, which seems fair enough. But not only have I made very little progress on the moulds, I have actually kind of gone backwards. Tomorrow I face making not two more of them, but three. On the ride home I take it out on the pedals.