Now I have been working with bronze axes and adzes every day for 2 months and have answered many questions about how to set up the edges and haft them efficiently. There are lots more questions I would love to explore but shall not have the time about the metallurgy of bronze. We did get into this a little when…
Things have been so busy the last few weeks I have not had time to post about the Heritage Crafts Associations spring conference to which our President The Prince of Wales sent a marvelous message copied below. We also had the great pleasure of having our new patron Emma Bridgewater speak with passion about the Stoke Pottery industry. You can…
The beauty of building a replica of the Bronze Age boat in Dover is that we are just 100 yards away from the 3,500 year old original. Whilst it has been studied and drawn in great detail there is no way every detail can be recorded but we can go and check fine details on the original boat as we…
One of the highlights of last year for me was Fritiof Runhall coming to Edale to teach two carving courses. He was such a fun and inspiring teacher. Part of the fun was that the course participants varied from beginners to some of the best carvers in the country and we were all learning together. This is what Steve Tomlin…
SPOONFEST is a gathering of everyone interested in spooncarving for a weekends fun, sharing and inspiration. It started out as a sort of pipe dream of getting all our favourite carvers together to talk spoons and carve together, it seems to have taken off into a genuine international event with carvers, collectors, beginners and fellow obsessives from Sweden, USA, Holland…
The Dover boat reconstruction I have been working on and blogging about over the last 8 weeks is pretty special and so we get lots of film crews around. The best record will be a Time Team special on the bronze age and particularly bronze age boatbuilding. It is as always fascinating to see the team work and crafting a…
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…
