So our Dover Bronze Age boat project has got to the stage for steaming the planks. These are heavy oak timbers 20 feet long an inch and a half thick and the first ones we need to bend are also curved cross section so thus increasing their rigidity and acting like a girder. The principle of bending wood is you…
Part of any craftsman’s work is tool maintenance and most serious craftspeople also want to make or adjust their own tools.We have the bronze heads cast for us from moulds made from original heads. One of the difficulties of this is that the originals were cast then hammered or “peened” to shape, work harden and sharpen them. This means they…
We are now about 6 weeks into our build and over the last 3 weeks we have been carving steaming and bending timbers. I have masses of photos so the next few posts will be pretty picture heavy, hope you enjoy, feel free to ask questions in the comments box. This is the upper part of the marquee with Trevor…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Now I am home I can finally update with pictures of the exciting project I am working on. In 1992 during construction of an underpass in Dover the remains of a stitched plank boat were discovered. It has never had as much press as the Mary Rose but from an archaeological point of view it is equally as interesting. It…
