2 great films carving an expanded dugout canoe

Though being known primarily as a turner and carver I seem to be getting more and more involved in interesting boatbuilding projects. I have a long term dream of building a birch bark canoe and loved my time helping with a viking ship build. Another boat I would love to help build one time is an expanded dugout. These boats look simple and elegant but I have no doubt there is a lot of accumulated knowledge in getting them to work just right and there also looks to be some potential for it all to go horribly wrong at the last stage after many days of work. These two films showing making them have quite different techniques for judging the thickness which is I suspect critical to getting an even bend.



and this one from Finland in the 1930s, if you have thought of dugouts before as ugly logs think again.

Bronze age woodworking tools early thoughts

These thoughts are based in 5 weeks working with bronze adzes and axes, I have learned a lot but feel there is still much more to learn and improve. At the moment we are all spending quite a bit of time fiddling with tools but as time goes on my time is spent experimenting and some of the tools that are sorted go several days with no attention. Here Trevor is sharpening and Richard is relashing with linen twine.

 

This head failed. It was made form a sycamore which was felled on an adjoining property and saved from the chipper. I used it green and found it to be quite unsatisfactory. There was no spring in the wood and as can be seen having removed the binding it developed a split. I would not rule sycamore out though. Maple is one of the species identified amongst original handles and I have now hafted one I had drying in a warm breezy environment for  2 weeks and it is performing well.

This shows how the end of the wood stops short of the cut away in the palstave, if it touches the head seems to bounce loose.

This is one adze I have with a very narrow profile, it is good for finishing but prone to "edge roll"when hitting hard knots.

 a few well aimed taps with a hammer puts it all back in line though.

Here is an index for all blog posts on the Dover boat project

bronze-age-woodworking-adzes-and-axes
more-bronze-age-woodworking
bronze-age-boat-building-pictures
bronze-age-boatbuilding-part-2
bronze-age-boatbuilding-part-3
bronze-age-boatbuilding-part-4
bronze-age-boatbuilding-part-5
bronze-age-woodworking-tools-early thoughts
building-bronze-age-dover-boat-part-6
building-bronze-age-dover-boat-part-7
boat-building-steaming-timbers
filming-with-time-team
more-bronze-age-boatbuilding.
casting-bronze-axes-and-adzes
more-bronze-age-boatbuilding.
20-hour-woodworking-marathon
woodworking-marathon-continued-just 18 hours to go.
dover-boat-launch-day-end-of-3-months work.
the boat-that-didnt-float.

Bronze Age boatbuilding part 5

Now the outside profile of my ile plank is looking pretty good. You can see the profile nearest the camera needs a bit more cutting from the left hand side to let it sit down so the top edges of the profile templates all sit parallel.

With the outside finished I turn it over and get stuck in to the inside. I have developed confidence in the bronze now and am swinging the tools with speed and power, surprising what they can take.

 rough hollowing leaving sections unhollowed where the cleats lie.

smoothing out note this is a very small light adze handle with lots of whip in it. Received wisdom has been to handle these tools with big heavy handles to make up for perceived lightness of the head which was seen as a drawback.

 At this stage all the check I need is using fingers as a guide. Nearly 20 years of bowlturning gives my fingers a pretty good idea and I was able to take it down to 35mm + or - 5mm

 marking the cleats ready to skim off the sides.

 and now a few shots of rapid hollowing with a big bronze adze on a flexible shaft.

 see the size of shavings that fly.

 the trick seems to me to be entry angle, steel tools like to enter the wood at around 45 degrees, bronze seems to work much better entering at a lower angle say 35. I don't know why, perhaps the thicker edges won't penetrate far at 45 but at 35 they start a cut then split off the chip.

 hollowing this way is fast, effectively between each cleat I have a big bowl, 12" wide and about 40" long and starting with 6" of wood proud. I can hollow one of these in about an hour.

 see the flex in the handle, using light flexible tools like this with relaxed loose wrists is far less tiring than heavy tools and tense wrists.

 the shavings allow me to feel my way into the tree by tearing strips of fibre.

 The roughly hollowed Iles bit more to go on the right, that one is being saved for some folk who are coming filming.

 and then with the small adze I clean off the sides of the cleats.

 last job is one which no bronze age boatbuilder would have to do but then we are trying to make an exact replica of an existing vessel which is different. With calipers I measure the thicknes and using a bit of Dover's white cliff chalk mark the high spots to take it down to a uniform 30mm

This may or may not be important when we come to steaming we suspect thick spots may cause kinks rather than sweet curves but don't know if we need to be 30mm + or - 1mm or 5mm

Bronze Age boatbuilding part 4

This is Richard Darrah who along with Ole Crumlin-Pedersen drew up the plans for the replica boat. The picture here is a 1/10th scale drawing of the curved ile which I am making.

 It is surprising how big a proportion of the time is spent marking, measuring, moving timber from one position to another to get it securely held in the nest position, then the hewing is actually quite quick.

 Here Trevor is rough shaping the cleats in the bottom planks.

 see the sizable chunk of oak flying off in this picture, bronze tools work surprisingly well.

 Then the surface is dressed to a clean level by eye.

 Meanwhile this is a hewers eye view of my ile. I have marked out a three dimensional curve and am using my Japanese carpenters axe to notch up to the line. It's important to get the bottom of the notches meeting just outside your line and nicely vertical, all done by eye.

 here it is ready to knock the notches off and rough hew.

 having turned it over now I am shaping the outside curve. I have made templates of the curve which fit various points along the length. A quick check with the template shows me where to remove wood.

 a quick rough hew working with the bronze adze now.

 and checking again it is not bad.

 then working by eye I blend the curves through from one known cross section to the next.

 the outside of the boat was apparently left with quite coarse adze shaped ribbing and I am trying to replicate this using a narrow adze. Tool marks can be totally eroded on old wood if it is used or exposed to the air for some time before being buried. Even when they show up well when excavated they loose most of their definition during conservation so we are reliant to a certain extent on talking to the excavators and looking at drawings and photos taken at the time.

 and here is the outside of the first ile nearly complete.

Bronze Age Boatbuilding part 3

A few folk have asked if there were artifacts found with the original boat. Sadly there were very few and those mostly fragmentary. The boat had clearly been pulled up out of the river to a marshy area and partly dismembered before sinking into the archaeological record. One artifact we do need is paddles. It is thought the side planks of this type of boat are not strong enough for oars and few bronze age paddles have been found. There is a bronze age oar from Canewdon in Essex, a good number of Neolithic paddles and a set of paddles from the Iron Age Hjortspring boat. From this evidence we came up with a range of possible paddle designs and we have a gorgeous straight grained ash log to make them from. Here I am starting the split.

 And our apprentice Rachel following in with wooden wedges to open the split up.

 The split opening nicely.

 The last fibres hanging on.

 Richard severing the last fibres. The loose strop around the log stops it suddenly rolling apart as it opens up, 1/4 of a ton of log can move quickly and crush a leg.

 Once the first split is done further splits are easy, we keep splitting in half until we have a paddle sized blanks.

One of our French partners Philippe Michele came to visit for the day and do some hewing, I showed him how to hew a paddle, just like a big spoon really.

and as part of the finished display they wanted a mock up of what a full sized boat would look like so we set up a plank and with a bit of photoshop work to double the length this will hopefully do the job.

Bronze Age Boatbuilding part 2

 My major task for the Dover boat reconstruction is to carve the iles. The boat is made of 4 main timbers, two flat ones across the bottom and two curved ones at the side. These would originally have been topped by another upright plank which was cut away presumably for re use when the boat was abandoned. The problem with the iles is there is not a straight line on them anywhere they are a very three dimensional shape. I will carve them then steam bend them to fit the sides of the bottom planks. Here I have snapped a line with a chalk line then measured up and down set amounts and am marking it in ready for hewing the first surface.

 Hewing starts with chopping notches, great fun.

 Then knocking the blocks off.

 You can do this with the surface lying vertical but I quite enjoy hewing horizontally if it is comfortable to do so. This shifts wood very fast, mayb e 20 minutes to rough chop, hew and refine a surface over the length of the boat timber (6m)

 Then dress the surface with a bronze axe, at this stage I still had little faith in the broinmze tools and wanted to give them an easy ride I ran down first with my gorgeous antique Japanese adze then just skimmed the surface with the bronze

Still for a first go I was impressed at how well they worked.
here is a short vid of my using one. At this stage I am using it very much Japanese style which is quite different to how the archaeologists have been using them. I have developed both hafting and technique since with interesting results.


The boat we are building will finish at about 8m long half the length we think the original was. Because we are not just trying to build a boat similar but one to within + or - 5mm of half the original dimensions we have to spend a lot of time measuring and marking. We have no straight line on the iles to measure from so we draw an arbitrary "pith line" on both tree and plans and measure up, down and across from this. Using this method to plot points every 10cm down the length of the timber I then join the dots in a smooth curve and hew away. Considerably more time is spent measuring than hewing.

 At the same time Trevor is working alongside on his two large bottom planks.

We also have two apprentices from ESAMP  working with us alternate weeks, Sam and Rachel. This is part of a £1.7m European funded project with lots of outreach materials produced for education packs so there are regular visits from film crews. Here is Sam getting used to the adze and the cameras.