How to Build a Boat

by Jonathan Gornall

Meanwhile, the edge of the transom at the back of the boat must be chiselled flat to receive the incoming plank, and at the correct angle. Again, more self-doubt, only compounded by the next, related step.

  At the stern and the stem, the overlap between two planks continues, but in such a way that instead of being visually overlapped, over the last couple of inches the two planks appear to be ‘edge-set’, or lying on the same plane, as I have briefly described earlier. This effect is achieved by chiselling or planing a slope, or rebate, into the land of the receiving plank, and a matching rebate on the incoming plank, at both stem and stern. This is truly horrible. I spend hours and hours trying to get this detail right on plank after plank, and almost always fall badly short. The result is a series of uneven steps in the planking at the rear of the boat, instead of the desired smooth curve. If anything gives away this boat to the seasoned eye as an amateurish effort, it will be that detail. But, you know, sue me.

  A crucial point, which haunts me for every inch of every plank from start to finish, is the need to ensure that the surface of the bevel is consistently flat. If it isn’t – if there’s so much as even a tiny raised mound on the bevel – then the joint can be compromised, allowing water in between the two planks. Flattening the surface of the bevel can be achieved by using the small block plane, followed up by careful paring with a chisel, but ‘can’ is the operative word. Progress is checked by placing any straight edge on the bevel – the side of the chisel blade does the job – and at times it seems impossible that the slight curvature it reveals will ever be eradicated.

  Only when all this is done does the new strake come into play. And, as all but two strakes on the boat consist of two planks, joined together roughly midway, fitting a new strake to the boat is done in two separate stages.

  The aft section goes on first, and it’s the next bit that haunts my dreams. Fabian’s brief summing up in his directive drains it of all apparent malice. Having clamped the new plank back in place on the boat, one must ‘adjust to fit rebate at transom’ and ‘adjust bevel on preceding plank for exact fit’.

  This process can, and indeed does, seem to go on for ever. At times it appears impossible that the joint between the plank and the edge of the transom will ever be light-tight, let alone watertight – at one moment there looks to be a gap where the rear face of the transom meets the underside of the plank. Some unconvincing chiselling ensues. Now when the plank goes back the gap has shifted to the forward face of the transom.

  Pinning down the source of such mysteries is testing and I seriously doubt a bear, even one assisted by a bird, could pull it off. Does the problem lie with the supposedly flat landing place I have chiselled out of the transom to receive the plank? Is it in fact flat, or slightly convex – or even concave? Or is the fault to be found in the rebate I have cut on the preceding plank? Or on the new one?

  A bit gets shaved off here, another slice is chiselled off there. Frequently I have the stomach-churning feeling that I’m flying blind, because I am. One trouble spot is subdued, only for another to flare up in its place. It is now clear to me that Newton must have come up with his Third Law – ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’ – in a boat shed. All the while, there’s the gnawing fear that the transom is being steadily eroded to the point of uselessness – a scenario unbearable to contemplate, condemning to death as it would both of the garboard planks already fitted to it.

  So off and on again goes the plank, so many times that it begins to feel that this is now my life’s work . . . and again, a bit gets shaved off here, another bit chiselled there.

  Ideally, there should be no gap between any two planks where they meet, either on the outside of the hull, or the inside. Eventually, driven by desperation and frustration, I settle for no gap on the outside of the hull, which, I reason, is after all where the water will be. For complete watertightness I place my faith in the subsequent riveting, which will squeeze the planks together and, with luck, compensate for any misfits. Two other factors aid this exercise in self-delusion. When the ribs finally go in, another row of riveted nails will be introduced, reducing the gap between rivets from 140mm to 70mm. And, when the boat finally goes in the water, I’m told its timbers are likely to swell a little, again helping to seal any small gaps.

  That, at least, is the theory, and after hours of struggling to get two malevolently disobliging planks to play nicely it’s an increasingly attractive one.

  Finally, everything more or less fits. With the clamps still holding the new plank in place, two or three positioning holes are drilled to ensure that when it comes off one last time it will go back in the same place. Countersunk holes are drilled at the stern to take the three stainless-steel screws that will fix the plank to the transom. The upper edge of the plank can now be marked, band-sawn and planed to its final shape.

  This lengthy, testing procedure will be repeated for every plank. In each case, usually after days of struggle, a solution is finally stumbled upon for each plank, in such a haphazard way that no useful lesson can be learnt for the next. Every time, I am an explorer, devoid of map, compass or sense of direction, hacking my way blindly through the jungle with a machete and suddenly surprised to find I have stumbled upon civilisation.

  With the plank back on the boat, and clamped down again, there’s one more job to be done before the rivets can go in – marking up the position of the scarf, which will have to be cut on the workbench.

  Scarfing is the process of joining two planks together, end to end, to make a single strake, which runs from one end of the boat to the other. Where the two planks meet, the last few inches of each one is cut into a wedge so the forward one overlaps the rearward. When the front plank goes on the boat the scarf is clamped and glued. As only four of the twenty strakes on the Nottage consist of single planks, I will have to create no fewer than sixteen scarfs.

  Scarfing is another element of the clinker tradition that dates back to time immemorial. Some experts believe that the decision to combine shorter planks to make single long strakes was driven not just by the search for flexibility but also by a gradual reduction in the availability of suitable timber, as clinker shipbuilding proceeded at a pace that soon began to outstrip nature’s ability to keep up. Planks in early boat finds, McKee writes in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration in 1976, ‘were often of a great size and were hewn out of half a tree’. The fourth-century Nydam ship is a good example. All of its strakes consist of a single plank, some of which are over 75ft long. But this method was ‘extravagant of both labour and material, and . . . dependent on suitable trees growing within transportable distance of water’, writes McKee. Eventually, ‘when the big trees were used faster than they grew, planks had to become narrower and shorter’.

  Ole Crumlin-Pedersen, the archaeologist who founded the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, reached the same conclusion. Studying the evolution of Viking ships he concluded that while the best-quality, largest oak trees were always used for high-status, or royal boats, ‘the size of the trees available for ordinary shipbuilders decreased markedly over time’.

  Nowadays, he wrote in a paper published in 1990, oak trees big enough to yield the planks that went into the Nydam ship ‘are probably not available anywhere and even in the Iron Age they must have been very hard to find’. It would, therefore, have been fairly early on in the evolution of the clinker technique that it was realised that longer ships could continue to be built only if some method were found of joining two or more planks together to create longer strakes.

  Time may have destroyed all the timber in the seventh-century Sutton Hoo ship, but such was the fine detail of the imprint left in the soil that it was clear that the hull had consisted of nine strakes on each side, and that some of these had been made up of as many as six separate planks, averaging only 18ft in length. No one knows where the Sutton Hoo ship was made – the absence of timber prevented the use of dendrochronology, which by reference
to international databases can not only set an accurate age but also suggest where the felled trees probably grew. But wherever it was, the evidence suggests they were running out of big trees. Likewise, in the 70ft Oseberg ship, a Viking longship built in about AD 800 and recovered remarkably intact from a burial mound in the south of Norway in 1904, the strakes consist of multiple planks, averaging only 13ft in length.

  It may, McKee suggests, even have been the lack of suitable trees that ultimately caused the demise of the clinker technique in the production of larger vessels. By the beginning of the Middle Ages native tree shortages meant English shipbuilders had already begun importing ready-cut planks from as far away as the Baltic. But even then the average length of these boards diminished from 5m in the ninth century to 2m in the fifteenth. In the end, ‘this . . . meant so many joins that leakage stopped clinker built ships getting any bigger’.

  Though at only 10ft long it is considerably shorter than the Sutton Hoo ship, the planking plan for the Nottage dinghy nevertheless calls for all but two of the strakes on either side of the hull to be made up from two planks each – the first and the seventh, which are straight enough to be got out of a single piece of wood.

  I haven’t been looking forward to scarfing. I’ve seen Fabian scarf two planks together and, of course, he made it look easy, but there’s real skill involved. It goes something like this: first, you mark the position of the scarf on the aft plank. This should be between two moulds to allow room for the clamps that will hold the scarf together during gluing. Ideally, it should also fall between two rows of rivets – this means that when the ribs finally go in, the nail at this point will be fixed through the scarf joint, adding to its strength. The scarf must also be positioned to take account of the length of the forward plank – both planks have to be long enough to overlap where they meet. Finally, you also have to think ahead; for reasons of structural strength, the position of scarfs on neighbouring strakes must be staggered. John Leather advises that scarfs ‘must be arranged so that none of them are close together. A distance of 6ft in length and three planks between should separate two scarfs on the same side of a boat which are in the same vertical line.’

  Marking a scarf is one thing – an ideal ratio for the length of the joint is 1:8, so two parallel lines 80mm apart are drawn across the 10mm-thick plank – but cutting it is quite another. Now the aft plank comes off the boat, for the final time, and the scarf is shaped on the bench. A diagonal line is drawn on both edges of the plank to mark the taper, which must end in a feather edge.

  Leather says professional boatbuilders ‘can put a plank in a vice and with a hand saw unhesitatingly cut a simple scarf which will have a true face’. I try this, and it’s hopeless – I simply can’t cut a straight line to the necessary degree of accuracy, but then I am, of course, no kind of professional. I read on. Amateurs, Leather then suggests, should make themselves a scarf box, in which the plank can be clamped and sawn at the correct angle. I waste half a day trying to fathom his instructions before giving up in disgust.

  There’s nothing for it. I shall have to copy Fabian’s technique. He simply clamps the plank down flat near the edge of the bench and planes down along the diagonal line. First, with the paring chisel he cuts away about a centimetre at the edge of the slope right down to the line; this will stop the wood breaking up where the blade of the plane leaves the edge. Other than that, though, it’s down to a sharp plane and plenty of checking to make sure that the taper follows the line precisely, and that there are no high spots in the scarf – a straight edge set on the surface shows them up.

  I was dreading this until one day, when I was giving Phoebe her bath, she created a huge wave by surging backwards and forwards and dumped a couple of gallons of bathwater on the floor. It was while I was on my hands and knees, grumbling and mopping up the flood with a towel, that I noticed something about the skirting board in the bathroom I had never seen before – and, if I had, that I wouldn’t even have been able to put a name to: it was scarfed. Two pieces of skirting board had been joined as one, and the joint had been all but disguised with paint.

  Somehow, I felt better about the prospect of scarfing after that. Suddenly, it was no longer a mysteriously romantic eighth- or seventh-century ritual, but an everyday, domesticated technique used for the altogether unromantic purpose of lapping lengths of skirting board in modern bathrooms.

  Before unleashing myself on the real thing, I try to emulate Fabian’s technique on some scrap pieces of planking. The first effort is a disaster. The second not so bad. The third . . . well, perfect would be pushing it, but I’m ready to give it a go on an actual strake. And, to my surprise, one of the jobs I have been fearing the most turns out not only to be relatively easy, but also enjoyable. So much so, in fact, that after the last scarfed strake goes on the boat I will find myself missing what has become a familiar, almost comforting process.

  Now it’s back to fixing in place that plank, with the scarf planed. All the ‘bearing’ surfaces – where wood will meet wood – are primed with varnish, with the exception of the scarf, which will later be glued to its sister on the strake’s forward plank. Mastic goes onto the transom and the first 150mm along the aft rebate. The first fixings to go in are the three screws that will hold the end of the plank to the transom. The plank isn’t clamped down at this stage – if you try to bend the plank down onto the transom by driving the screws in, you will split the wood. Guess how I know this? Nothing that a dollop of epoxy resin won’t fix later.

  With the transom end screwed down, the rest of the plank is then bent round and, guided by the position holes, clamped in place. It remains only to fasten the plank with the rivets. That done, the excess mastic is wiped off where it has oozed out and the back end of the plank is sawn off flush with the transom.

  This bit always feels like something of a moment, and it is. The hull is taking shape. But the job is only half-done. Fitting and fixing the forward part of the strake is a will-sapping repeat of the back end – more bevels and rebates – except that, as with the garboard plank, the front end of the plank must first be fitted perfectly to the stem before the other steps are carried out. Three screws will hold the front edge of the plank to the stem, where it will sit on a bed of mastic that extends back 150mm along the rebate.

  When the front plank fits, but before it’s fixed in place, it’s clamped into position so its back end overlaps the scarf on the rear plank. Clamped tight at this point, the position lines marking the start and finish of the scarf are transferred to the forward plank. Off it comes one last time to have the scarf taper planed on the bench. With the plank back on the boat, most of the nails are riveted in before both faces of the scarf are coated with a thickened mix of epoxy resin. Lengths of plywood, covered in parcel tape to prevent them being glued to the planks, are clamped in place above and below the joint to ensure even pressure is exerted across the whole area of the scarf by the clamps. The final nails will be riveted in, through and either side of the scarf, the following day, when the resin has set and the clamps can come off.

  This process, this seemingly endless round of repeated and yet never quite repeatable steps, is my life from spring to summer 2017. The summer solstice on 21 June comes and goes unnoticed, along with the subtle shortening of the days. Kate and Phoebe will go away for a few days without me. Outside the shed, the seasons will change, the swifts (or maybe the swallows) will swoop low across the farmyard in the evening sun and slow-wheeling buzzards will ride thermals high in the sky. My only concession to the arrival of summer is to slide open the double doors of the shed, which lets in more light, a cooling breeze and a steady trickle of visitors who have come for pottery classes on the farm and are intrigued by the guy in the next shed who’s building a boat.

  In all, what with journalistic interruptions, it will take me from 12 April to 3 July to plank the boat. Without Fabian’s occasional guidance and unfailing reassurance at the end of a telephone line I’d probably still be at it.
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  18

  PIRATES AND FAIRIES

  ‘Look at that sea, girls – all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn’t enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.’

  – L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

  23 APRIL 2017

  Two days ago I said yes to a major commission from the Daily Mail that is going to keep me away from the boat shed for a week or more. It has to be done – I need the money and, like most freelance journalists, I fear the consequences of saying no, but stopping work on the boat just as I’m getting going on the planking makes me feel anxious.

  On the other hand, it gives me the chance to help Kate prepare for Phoebe’s third birthday party in the village hall. My contribution, apart from organising the bouncy castle and the helium balloons? To return briefly to the shed, not to work on the boat but to reassign the bandsaw to the task of fashioning some ships’ anchors and skull-and-crossbones signs from plywood left over from templating.

  The theme of the party is Pirates and Fairies, which Phoebe came up with herself. Although she is only three years old, we choose to interpret this as her open-mindedly embracing the broad spectrum of life choices that will be hers. On the other hand, we recognise that her inspiration could just as easily have come from binge-watching Peter Pan and/or Jake and the Never Land Pirates.

  Regardless, Kate responds with an amazing four-tier cake that hits all the buttons. Storm-churned waves of various shades of blue lap at the hull of a chocolate-brown pirate ship, which, with its cannon rolled out for action, is flying the Jolly Roger and pressing forward under acres of billowing sails. Fish and mermaids break the surface of the sea as they race to keep up. Clouds scud by in the pale-blue sky overhead, which gives way on the uppermost tier to the star-studded darkness of night. Above it all, reclining on a star and leaning against the new moon with amused indifference, is a fairy.