How to Build a Boat

by Jonathan Gornall

  Actually, rivets had been found on another part of the site before, but they had been treated with less than due archaeological reverence. On 24 November 1860, the Ipswich Journal reported that one of five ‘Roman’ barrows at Sutton Hoo had been opened, and ‘a considerable number (nearly two bushels [16 gallons]) of iron screw bolts were found, all of which were sent to the blacksmith to be converted into horse shoes’. A fine case of trans-era recycling, if a poor example of good archaeological practice.

  Every one of my League of Dead Experts has something to say about the crucial business of riveting planks together, though none as succinctly as Eric McKee. Admittedly with the aid of a step-by-step diagram, he boils the process down to just six words: ‘Drill, drive, rove, punch, nip, clench.’ This means that first a hole is drilled through the two pieces of wood to be riveted together, countersunk, and then a square-shanked copper nail is driven through the hole. A rove, a slightly dome-shaped copper washer, is then pushed down over the point of the nail. Next, a heavy bar of metal, known as a dolly, is held against the head of the nail to prevent it coming out as the rove is driven home with a hammer and a hollow punch. At this point rove and nail, drawn together, will be squeezing the two pieces of wood tightly in their grip. All but 2mm of excess nail should then be clipped off. Keeping the dolly hard against the nail head, the remaining 2mm of shank protruding inside the hull is hammered out over the rove.

  Michael Verney offers the observation that ‘the procedure in fitting a riveted copper nail is . . . really a two-man operation although, with a certain amount of ingenuity and the use of cramps, it can sometimes be done single-handed’. But John Leather is more encouraging about the prospects for the lone riveter. ‘After a little practice,’ he writes, ‘it should be possible for an amateur to nail and rivet a plank in about three-quarters of an hour.’

  It falls to John Gardner, the experienced, no-nonsense father of the American traditional boat revival, to get real about the unseen pitfalls for the unwary amateur. When riveting is done incorrectly, he warns, such as ‘when too big a hammer is used and the blows struck are too heavy, when the rivets are not clipped short enough, when the burrs [roves] used are sloppy [too large] and don’t hold firmly when forced down . . . especially when all of these conditions obtain together – the rivets will buckle and cripple within the wood, without drawing tight, even to the point of sometimes splitting the lap’. When this happens, he adds somewhat unnecessarily, ‘it is not the fault of the rivet, but rather the fault of the riveter’.

  Those who are new to riveting, Gardner says, ‘should practise at the bench on laps identical to those on the boat until they get the hang of it. Not until they can head-over rivets perfectly should they attempt it on the boat. Those who leave their practising for the boat will surely regret it.’

  I take Gardner at his word. I cut two 2ft pieces of 10mm thick planking stock, bevel the edge of one to simulate the land, and clamp the other to it. With the assembly held firm in the jaws of a Workmate, I drill my first three trial holes, taking care to use a bit slightly smaller than the shank of the copper nail that will be driven through it. Two problems emerge immediately.

  The idea is to drill the hole for the nail bang in the middle of the 20mm overlap zone between the two planks. Drill too far away from the edge of the top plank and there’s a danger that you’ll either miss the plank underneath altogether, or come too close to its edge and split it. Straying too close to the outer edge of the top plank, on the other hand, also risks splitting that plank. It isn’t hard to mark the intended positions of the holes with a pencil – 10mm in from the edge – but I immediately discover that this isn’t enough. The larch from which my planks are cut was fast-grown, in a climate with significant temperature variations between seasons, which means there are wide variations in the thickness and hardness of its growth rings. Attempting to drill through one of the hard rings without first punching a guide hole almost guarantees that the bit will slide off and dig into the nearest piece of softer wood.

  As a result, my first three experimental holes are all over the place. Worse, perhaps, is the scene inside the planking. One of the holes has come out right on the edge of the second plank, splitting it. Another is not much better and, although it hasn’t actually split the wood, it’s sufficiently close to the edge so that the rove will not sit completely on timber, but will partly hang in mid-air – uselessly. And the third hole reveals another problem.

  It’s natural to present a drill bit at right-angles to the wood. That, at least, is my excuse for failing to take account of the fact that, because of the bevelled angle of the overlap land, the two planks lie on different planes. So although the nail enters the top plank at an angle of 90 degrees to the wood, it exits the second plank at perhaps 70 degrees. This matters, because the rove must be square to the surface of the wood. If it isn’t, it can’t be driven down squarely over the nail, which means the nail will probably distort in the wood, and the two planks won’t be drawn tight together. Result? See Gardner’s list of disastrous outcomes, all predictive of a leak in the hull.

  The solution is to angle the drill bit so it is square not to the outside plank, but to the lapped plank underneath. Like much about building this boat, this is easier said than done. ‘Seeing’ through the top plank in order to set the angle of the bit correctly for the bottom plank demands concentration each and every time – concentration that is, as I shall discover, often hard to summon up, especially when exhausted.

  Riveting a boat, as Verney observes, is really strictly a two-person job, which is a problem if there is only one of you. Most boatbuilders, however, work alone on small boats and so each comes up with a workaround. Fabian’s consists of an ingenious device that plays the part of the dolly, which frees up one hand. Essentially it’s a U-shaped metal clamp, with a throat deep enough to span a couple of planks. One arm of the clamp, which goes inside the boat, is fitted with a flat, forked tongue that straddles the nail hole. At the end of the other arm is a threaded steel bolt, which is screwed down tight on the head of the nail. At the other end of the bolt is a heavy lump of lead, which also doubles as the handle for screwing it in. It is, essentially, a dolly on a clamp.

  Heavy, and awkward to use, this takes some getting used to and must be set up just right – the business end must be located exactly on the head of the nail, and an eye must be kept on its tendency to slide off as it is screwed down. This, however, is corrected automatically if a sufficiently deep countersink has been drilled for the nail, as this locates the head of the bolt correctly. But awkward or not, it works and, with its indispensable help, I get the entire garboard plank riveted to the hog – in effect, just another plank – in little more than an hour. What was it Leather said? Three-quarters of an hour for a plank? Not such a bad first go, then. True, some of the nails have gone through slightly wonky, causing roves to cut a little into the planking along one edge or another, but nothing has split and everything seems tight.

  It’s time to go home. I stand at the bow of the inverted boat and look along its length. The garboard strakes are on, on both sides of the keel. To my surprise, it’s starting to look, just a little, like an actual boat. I take lots of pictures, a proud parent with a newborn child.

  But reality dulls my joy. After all, it took Fabian less than half a day to get the first garboard plank on and it has taken me the best part of six days. But practice, surely, is going to make perfect – and with another eighteen strakes to go I have a whole lot of practice ahead of me. Exactly how much, I try very hard not to consider in too much detail, but even my shaky maths tells me that if I continue plodding along at the same snail’s pace it will be another 108 days before the hull is done.

  Of course, thinking like that is fatal, as I learnt to my cost in the Atlantic in 2001. With nothing but sea and sky to contemplate hour after hour on the oars, my mind wandered and I couldn’t resist dividing each day’s often lousy mileage into the distance left to run and coming up with a depress
ing number of days still ahead of me. Psychologically I was just about holding my own until day forty-two of the crossing when the news came through that Kiwis Matt Goodman and Steve Westlake had won the race and were ashore in Barbados. Ashore! Sipping cold beers, eating real food, basking in the glow of their triumph . . .

  At that point, being stuck out alone in the Atlantic, struggling with a limited and nauseating diet, an increasingly unreliable water-maker and inadequate power generation seemed utterly futile. I finally gave up six days later, on 23 November, after forty-seven days at sea. I still had over 1,400 miles to go. While Goodman and Westlake had averaged well over 50 miles a day, I was lucky to hit 20 and, at that rate, as I calculated obsessively on an almost hourly basis, I faced at least another seventy days at sea.

  Seen against that scenario, at least, the task of planking a boat doesn’t seem quite so onerous.

  17

  TO HULL AND BACK

  ‘Instead of the broad, whole strakes of Hjortspring [300 BC] and Nydam [320 AD], we now [with the Kvalsund ship, 690 AD] have narrower and more strakes, scarfed from several pieces. Presumably experience had taught them that it was a superstition to believe that broad, whole strakes without joints were so strong. It is soon to be recognised among boatbuilders that the ship will have much more elasticity at sea with a hull made out of many boards joined together.’

  – A. W. Brogger and Haakon Shetelig, The Viking Ships

  22 APRIL 2017

  Right from the outset Kate and I decided that in the best interests of raising a socially acceptable child, certain words were going to have to be purged from the Gornall family vocabulary. There were all the usual and obvious suspects, of course – more of a tough ask for me, coming from a journalistic culture that positively encouraged the free use of every taboo slang word found in the classic 1979 edition of the Collins English Dictionary, and then some.

  Littering your conversation with swear words, as I was quick to point out to Kate, is not necessarily a sign of a poor education or an inability to express oneself. According to research published in 2014 by two American psychologists in the journal Language Sciences, while it is a common assumption that ‘people who swear frequently are lazy, do not have an adequate vocabulary, lack education, or simply cannot control themselves’, in fact a large and varied taboo lexicon ‘may better be considered an indicator of healthy verbal abilities rather than a cover for their deficiencies’.

  Nevertheless, this, I conceded, was something Phoebe could work out for herself when she was older, and I made a major effort to mind my language. Sometimes – usually behind the wheel of the car, if I’m honest – I fell from grace, but on the whole I was proud of the extent to which I cleaned up my act. It helped, I guess, that we seemed to be raising a snitch; whenever I did swear, at the earliest opportunity Phoebe would rush to report the offence to her mummy, along with a delighted, word-perfect delivery of the offending phrase in question.

  But as Phoebe began to master language, soaking it up from us, her peers, staff at her nursery, children’s television and overheard conversations in public places, so we felt the need to add other words to the banned list. Describing someone as ‘fat’, ‘ugly’ or ‘stupid’, we told her, was unkind and disrespectful.

  Then, one bedtime, about a week or so into the trauma that was the early days of planking, by popular demand Phoebe and I were reading a book we hadn’t looked at together for a while. The last time I’d read Bear, Bird and Frog, nothing had jumped out at me as being any more wildly improbable than any of the other anthropomorphising children’s books out there, in which pigs drive cars, mice fly to the moon and frogs lecture dogs about the fundamental unfairness of the animal kingdom’s hierarchical seating arrangements.

  But this time, when I turned a page and read that Bird ‘walked down to the big blue lake to sit in the boat he had made with Bear last summer’ (my italics), before I knew what was happening I had uttered the phrase ‘What a load of old bollocks’.

  Phoebe, delighted, sat bolt upright in bed. A heartbeat of silence, then ‘Mummy!’ she shouted, as loud as she could – which was pretty loud. ‘Mummy!’

  In vain, I tried to hush up my transgression. ‘Darling, Daddy said a bad word, he’s very naughty and he’s very sorry. So no need to bother Mummy . . .’

  Too late, of course. Kate was already at the top of the stairs, coming into the room. By now Phoebe was out of bed, grinning and jumping up and down. ‘Mummy,’ she squeaked excitedly. ‘Daddy said “pollocks”.’

  My only excuse, which rightly cut no ice with Kate, was that struggling to come to terms with the whole planking thing was proving stressful. And, when I read the absurd suggestion that a bear and a bird, without so much as a single opposable thumb between them, for heaven’s sake, had casually knocked out a clinker boat one summer . . . well, let’s just say I’d like to see them try, that’s all.

  The garboard strake was tough enough. But if I thought that was painful, the remaining eighteen strakes have their own take on torture. I’ve just finished fixing the first strake after the garboard and it has taken me an entire week to do it. In doing so, I have confronted and, more or less, overcome each of the thirty or so steps necessary to accomplish this. But I am also just a little bit in shock. There are, after all, another seventeen strakes to go – a total of thirty-two individual planks – and if I carry on at this rate . . .

  Of course, it doesn’t bear thinking about, so I stop right there. Besides, as Fabian asserts encouragingly in his emailed guidance on the subject, fitting and fixing a plank is ‘an iterative procedure . . . much improved by dexterity from practice’. I sincerely hope so.

  In some ways, the process of putting a clinker plank on a boat could be described as reasonably simple. A length of timber, of the correct thickness but cut a little bit longer and wider than necessary, is clamped roughly in position. The required width to which it must be trimmed down on the bandsaw is clearly defined by two sets of guidelines already on the boat. The bottom edge of the plank (the bottom, that is, as seen when the boat is turned back up the right way) must overlap the proceeding plank by exactly 20mm – the ‘land’ – and the desired position of the upper edge of the plank, marked on every mould, is equally clear. With the plank clamped in place and overlapping these two boundaries, the lines are easily transferred by pencil. Over to the bandsaw and there you have it – one plank, cut to size.

  But, of course, it is much, much more complicated than that.

  Fixing a garboard plank to the hog and keel is one thing, but adding a plank to another already on the boat opens a whole new can of woodworms. For a start, the existing plank has to be made ready to receive the newcomer, and that means three things have to happen – three things over which the amateur will curse, sweat and labour for hour upon hour.

  First, the 20mm-wide land must be bevelled to allow for the fact that, thanks to the curve of the hull, the incoming plank will lie on each of the moulds at a slightly different angle to the plank to which it is to be fixed. Next, two sloping rebates must be cut, one at the front end of the plank, the other at the back. Corresponding rebates will then have to be cut on the new plank, too, so that over the last foot or so of the hull at stem and stern the clinker overlap gradually vanishes until the two planks are lying on the same plane flush with stem and transom.

  And it is here, in the detail of these procedures, that the true challenge of clinker boatbuilding is to be found. It’s hot, bloody, frustrating work, hand-to-hand combat with history and tradition, and in the heat of the battle all the romantic associations of clinker boats evaporate. This is the real thing. Red Boat, the Sutton Hoo burial ship, Aldeburgh fishing boat, Viking longships, Arthur Ransome’s Swallow, even Sea Beatrice; the skin-deep beauty has been stripped away and the viscera – the blood and guts of what it takes to create such a thing – are exposed.

  Well, that’s more or less what it felt like by the time I’d wrestled my first plank onto the boat.

 
Figuring out the angle of the bevel on the edge of the plank already on the boat would be fairly easy if the hull had a single profile along its entire length – if, say, it was like a length of guttering, cut in half lengthways. But it isn’t. At the back of the boat the hull, seen from behind, is shaped a bit like a champagne saucer. Near the front, where all the planks bend in to meet the narrow stem, a better analogy would be a narrow goblet. And, in between those two extremes, each of the planks goes its own way as the overall shape of the hull broadens out amidships before narrowing in again towards the bow.

  A lifetime ago, or so it seems, I used the offsets table on the plans to mark the position of the top edge of each of the ten strakes on either side of the boat on the four moulds, the transom and the stem. Now the importance of the accuracy of those marks – and, indeed, the shape of the moulds – becomes apparent. The angle of the bevel on the plank already in position is determined by setting a straight rule between the marked plank line on the mould and the edge of the plank. The ruler’s edge mimics the position in which the inner face of the new plank will lie. The vertical distance between the underside of the ruler and the line marking the inner edge of the 20mm-wide land on the fixed plank gives the depth to which the bevel should be planed at the edge of the plank.

  If you’ve followed that, you’re either a boatbuilder or you’re in the wrong line of work.

  So that’s fine for setting the angle of the bevel at each mould. But then how to determine the bevel along the plank either side of each mould? That, says Fabian, can be achieved only ‘by inspection or interpolation’. This, I think, is boatbuilder talk for ‘educated guesswork’. Certainly, figuring out how much or how little to plane off between the marked bevel depths proves to be a source of endless, confidence-shaking grief, an ordeal of trial and error in which the incoming plank will go on and come off the boat countless times.