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…
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…
The most complete example of advanced technical woodworking from Bronze age Europe is the Dover Boat, built around 1550BC and discovered during construction of a new underpass in 1992. Despite the rarity and importance of the find archaeologists had only 7 days to excavate and remove the first section of the boat from site before work continued. A second excavation…
I am currently involved with a very exciting woodworking project which I will post lots about in due course but there is a press embargo until March the 6th. For now I can tell you that I have been having fun experimenting with bronze tools. I have used bronze tools a little in the past but only felled an odd…
This is an absolute gem. Sent to me by blog Reader Tim Marshall, recorded in 1984 two “bushmen” Bill Boyd and Mark Garner fell a tree, split “slabs” off it and hew them to make house timbers. I have worked with some seriously talented hewers in Japan, Germany and the best from the UK, when I watched the first few…
One last post on my time with the replica Oseberg ship. I always like to have an overview of this sort of project and share what I have learnt. Often the interest is the detail but the most important things are the big picture about how the worksite works and the project is organised. This is clearly a multimillion pound/dollar…
