Well I think it is time for some tool pictures. The tools made for the building of the new Oseberg ship form the largest collection of replica Viking woodworking tools in the world. This is the main tool room. It’s easy to see at a glance whether a tool is missing at the end of the day, this helps when…
This post will mostly be pictures, some of the replica, some of the original Oseberg ship. The last post left a board steamed, bent fitted and riveted or klinked on to the hull. As the hull takes shape each point is measured and set to ±5mm. It can be adjusted slightly by pressing up from underneath with props or by…
Ships built with overlapping planks like Viking ships are called “lapstrake” in the USA, in the UK we call them “clinker built”. I had never known why until I hammered home one of the rivets that is the key to this construction and asked what it’s name was in Norwegian, it’s called a klink and the verb klinking fits perfectly…
So in our next installment in Viking boatbuilding we take the planks that were previously cleft, rough hewn and planed and trial fit them to the boat. Each and every board is different and is an exact replica of a particular board on the original ship. This is the office with the masterplan and to the left you can see…
In part 1 we covered a little of the history of the Oseberg ship and the project to make a reconstruction and then cleft a large oak into 16 thin pie shaped wedges to make boards. The next stage is to hew these boards down from the pie shape into an even 1″ thickness. There are various ways of holding…
In 1903 a Norwegian farmer dug into a mound in one of his fields and made a discovery which archaeologists rate as comparable in importance to the grave of Tutankhamun. The Oseberg farm is 60 miles south of Oslo outside the town of Tonsberg and for years Oscar Rom had wondered what lay under the mound in his field, people…
first a nice new one about rakemakers the Rudd family in Cumbria. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/4231211 w=400&h=225]16 TEETH – Cumbria’s last traditional rakemakers from Rii Schroer on Vimeo. and some old ones about sussex trug making, first in colour from 1963 TRUGS and then back to 1929 BASKET MEN OF SUSSEX and finally Irish coracle making, nice shots at the end of…
This is one of my favourite Heritage sites. Located in the South Cumbria it is the last bobbin mill surviving with all it’s original machinery. I have visited several times and taken the tour, watching the turning machines peeling rough coppice roundwood down to round bobbins in second is a bit like watching a toilet roll unwinding at speed, just…
fan birds are a wonderful traditional craft of eastern Europe. I first became aware of them when my friend Del Stubbs in the US wrote to me about them in the mid 1990’s he carves very fine ones. I saw lots of them when I visited Russia in 1998 including some huge ones in the Ethnographic museum in St Petersburg,…
I wrote this article a few years ago before I was blogging and thought it might be of interest to have here. Fitting an axe handle in this blog post. First wood selection. The perfect wood is nice straight grain ash fairly fast grown, if it gets more than 6-8 rings per inch it is much more brittle, 4-6 rings…
