Tricks of the trade

All boatbuilders in Japan are familiar with this trick, which we used to align the stem and keel plank.  We stretched a string from the top of the stem on the centerline down to our centerline on the keel.  Then I hung the sashigane (square) from the string so the corner hung just above the line.  It makes an interesting plumb bob for lining these parts up.  

The sashigane is much lighter than a Western square and extremely flexible as well, two qualities that come in handy in many situations.  The scarf between the stem and keel is locked with a hardwood wedge.

Visiting Craftsman

Across the Festivale grounds from our shop are a pair of Bengali shipwrights.  They brought with them to Japan a twelve-foot dinghy.  The first day I was here it was intact, and the next time I came by it had been disassembled.  They are now slowly putting it back together as a demonstration.  Its a remarkable boat and they are amazing craftsmen and I hope to devote a blog post to them later.

They have been very interested in our work and the day we nailed the two boards together for the bottom we invited them over.  They enjoyed nailing and afterwards the lead carpenter said if I gave him a hardwood block he would make me a traditional Bengali hand plane.  

Then yesterday an older Japanese man stood watching us.  I could tell by his weather beaten features that he was working class, and I suspected he might have been a carpenter.  Sure enough, when I asked him he said he had built houses.  I would guess he is in his eighties.  I invited him into our shop space and he walked over to my tools, picked up one of my planes, took the blade out and sat down at our sharpening stones and began to sharpen.  I have always really enjoyed this kind of informality in Japan, where the dominant culture is so obsessed with politeness and formalities, but here is a guy who, like the Bengalis, happily pitches in immediately.

Kawara

Kawara

The photos here show our temporary shop structure at the Port.  Mr. Koji Matano, a glass artist and builder of Western boats, was the coordinator of our project  (minamiizu.net).  I have a Japanese apprentice, canoe guide and canoe builder Takumi Suzuki (www.hacarame.com).  You can see him with his wife Yoshiko and a drawing on the boat we are building.  We worked with an 84-year old craftsman, literally the last boatbuilder of the region, for information on this boat.  A local shipyard donated some nails to us from stock they had not used in many years.  Mr. Tengu Shibafuji of Kochi City gave us over 250 hand-made boat nails that he got from the family of a desceased boatbuilder.  

We started by laying out he lines for our bottom plank, called kawara, and then fitting the seam using a series of handsaws.  Those readers familiar with my blog may remember this technique, which may be unique to Japanese boatbuilding.  Finally, yesterday we chiseled the mortises for our edge nails which will join the two planks together.

The Festival

The Festival

I am working this summer building a 20-foot workboat as part of the Setouchi Festivale, an international art event centered on five islands near the city of Takamatsu, Japan.  My project takes place in the Takamatsu Port, where craftspersons are working at a variety of traditional arts.  There is a huge contingent of Bengali craftspeople, from metal workers to potters to boatbuilders.  

You can learn more about the Festivale here, and I will be keeping a special blog on my project, which is in English and Japanese.  I suspect this blog will have more text and information than that one:

Setouchi International Art Festival:

http://setouchi-artfest.jp/en/

Our project blog:

http://woodenboat.jp/setouchi/

A good friend of mine wrote a nice article about the art and the islands.

James Jack article:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/03/28/arts/unearthing-the-seto-inland-seas-social-landscapes/#.UahXEmQayc0

Japan: Preparing Lumber

My friend Koji Matano, founder of the Wooden Boat Center in Takashima, Japan, oversaw the felling and sawing of three cedar trees and one hinoki.  This is more than enough material for our boat, but we needed to sort the material and stack it for drying.

Setouchi International Art Festival:

http://setouchi-artfest.jp/en/

Our project blog:

http://woodenboat.jp/setouchi/

Koji had painted the endgrain with glue and roughly stacked it all before my arrival.  Japanese boatbuilders normally insist on one year of air drying of their timber.  We are pressed for time, and hope that by placing the stacks well off the ground on concrete blocks, plus the breezy location on the shore of Lake Biwa, that we will have dry enough material come July.  

Japanese boatbuilders use flitch-sawn material; that is, the log is sliced straight through.  Normally the keel timber is a thick plank taken from the center, and each pair of planks (garboard and sheer) are taken symmetrically from the log either side of the center.  Therefore I had to hunt through the pile, finding appropriate planks for each part, then finding their match for the opposite plank.  I labeled the the names of the parts on the stickers we nailed across the endgrain.

We worked sometimes during snow flurries.  Lake Biwa is Japan's largest lake, located right in the center of the country, 50 minutes by train from Kyoto.

Back in Japan, briefly.

I am back in Japan, doing some preparation work for a project I have here next summer.  I was accepted into the 2013 Setouchi Festivale, an art and craft exhibition taking place in the Seto Inland Sea region.  I will be building a traditional Japanese boat as a public demonstration in Takamatsu City.

The Festival has an excellent website and we have started a blog specifically for this project.  I will continue to post here as well as at our project blog.

Setouchi International Art Festival:

http://setouchi-artfest.jp/en/

our blog:

http://woodenboat.jp/setouchi/

I came over to measure a boat at the Seto Inland Sea Museum as well as to select the lumber I will use for the project.  My partner in this is Mr. Koji Matano, a former glass artist and now a builder of Western-style boats.  He is also the founder of the Wooden Boat Center in Takashima.  Mr. Takumi Suzuki, a canoe guide and builder of wood-canvas canoes, will be assisting me as my apprentice.

The Museum is Japan's oldest boat collection, and what we chose was a type called a tenmasen, or small cargo boat.  The museum has drawings and this detailed model of the type.  They also have a mockup of a full-size boat displayed in a boatshop setting, which we measured.  Later I will develop the lines full size (lofting), which is actually not a traditional Japanese method.

Some of the collection in the museum's main hall.  

On our way to Takamatsu we visited with the last boatbuilder of the region.  Tsuda san is a fourth generation boatbuilder I first met in 2003.  He had a remarkable career building all types of boats.  We had a nice visit and he eagerly showed us photographs of his boats, and gave us advice.

Our lumber, which was taken from two cedar trees in Tokushima Prefecture.  These planks are 23-feet long and some are nearly three feet wide at the butt.  We sorted and stacked the material for drying and I chose which planks will be used for particular parts of the boat.

A view of the Inland Sea.

Lofting Workshop

For a week in early January I taught a lofting workshop at the Carpenter’s Boat Shop, a nine-month apprentice program in Pemaquid, Maine (http://www.carpentersboatshop.org/).  Eleven apprentices lofted a series of small boats over the course of the week, and also built half models.

We loft on paper, using a temporary table.  I find this much more convenient as I can store lofted boats by just rolling up the drawings, and working at table height is much more comfortable than on one's hands and knees.

We began by lofting a very simple flat-bottomed skiff, actually a boat that I had previously built with students in the Boat Shop’s summer class program.  The skiff gave students an introduction to the principles of laying out the lines of a boat full-size, along with a sense of how the three views lofted (profile, plan, and sections) work together to provide information on construction details such as mould shapes, bevels and the stem rabbet.

From the first boat we moved on to a round-bottomed boat, which featured waterlines, buttock lines and diagonals.  There, apprentices had to not only loft and fair the lines, but makes sure the lines in the three views reconciled with each other.  

By Wednesday midday it seemed like a good time for a break, so we turned to the shop and students cut lifts and glued up blanks for half models.  The models ranged from a Thai river boat (lines found on the internet) to the famous Herreshoff 12-1/2 sloop.

We finished the week lofting several more boats, hopefully two models that the Boat Shop may be building later this year.  It was great to see the apprentices really understand the process, one that I feel is essential to anyone wanting to learn traditional boatbuilding.  The ability to loft a boat opens many more resources for boatbuilders, and allows the builder to work out construction issues and pattern out many elements of a boat before building.  For more about lofting, visit this page at my website:  http://www.douglasbrooksboatbuilding.com/lines.html