Sam Llewellyn
Forget your Silicon Valley, steam railway or the wheel – it was boatbuilding and the humble hammer that kickstarted technology
Back in the beginning was the hammer. It was a bit of stick to which a lump of stone had been lashed with animal sinews. Stone Age Man used it to knock down trees. Then he used it to conk animals on the head, and collect more sinews, which he employed to bind the trees together. He then dragged the whole lot into the sea and set off on slow and perilous voyages of discovery.
After a while he realised that if you knocked some chips off the stone end of the hammer it could be persuaded to cut things, and become an axe.
This spelled an end to the often unsuccessful process of felling mighty oaks by hitting their trunks hard, and led to the discovery that if you made the front end of the trunks pointed, it helped them travel through the water.
The sky’s the limit
Discovery now speeded up. The pressure on wildlife caused by the increased demand for sinews led to the invention of string. But string tended to rot, so someone discovered that if you found a knothole in the wood and banged in a stick to connect it with another knothole, you had something called a trenail. But the odds against two knotholes aligning were depressingly long. So someone chipped the hammer to a point, and rotated it instead of banging it, and bingo, a drill.
The sky was now just about the limit. Large boats came into being, built from planks riven by a kind of sharp hammer without a handle called a wedge, and smoothed by axes with blades rotated through ninety degrees, called adzes.
No longer did you have to sit on a raft made of tree trunks and gristle, feeling that you perhaps looked less impressive than you felt. Now you could sail the two seas in something relatively sleek.
Further tools evolved, and with them discovery, increasing the number of seas to seven. With new tools came new kinds of boat – Viking double enders, tubby cogs, the cod’s-head-and-mackerel-tailed flyers built by Matthew Baker for Francis Drake and his heavy friends.
Iron nails proliferated, so hammers survived; but gadgetry became ever more ingenious. Tool development pushed boat development and vice versa. And before you could say draw-knife, here came William Fife and other poets in timber, and steel on the Clyde, and GRP everywhere. Finally, at the pinnacle of boatbuilding evolution, PBO arrived on the scene.
A month ago, inspired by the advice in the richly informative pages of this organ, I added to the personal fleet an ancient plastic ketch we found slumped under brambles in the corner of a boatyard. Hauling five toolboxes and an inverter on board, we commenced restoration.
We are doing nicely so far. For the engine there is a variety of spanners, socket, ring, adjustable, and tube. We are using many stainless screws, and we drill holes for them with something electric, and screw in the screws with something else electric, in a manner that would have astonished the cog builders of Stettin, let alone the sinew-binders of the Stone Hammer age.
The carpentry will be largely powerassisted. When it comes to paint and varnish, we will be using electric sanders – disc, belt and detail – and keeping the dust out of our lungs with a rich variety of medically approved masks and respirators.
We will apply the various gunks with rollers, foam brushes, regular brushes, sprayers and forced labour.
Rig tension? There is a meter for that, and for just about everything else. The toolboxes, in short, contain a state-of-theart DIY inventory, and every single item in them is used.
Gadgetry became ever more ingenious. Tool development pushed boat development and vice versa
Frontier mentality
We are pushing some tool frontiers of our own. There is the domestic ladder we put up to the mizzen jumper struts when it was time to reconnect the triatic, and the dodgy mainsail on which we recline for the after-lunch snooze.
Apart from this fine tuning, though, the restoration represents the apex of boat tool history. We have risen far beyond primitive implements such as hammers...
What do you mean, the propeller won’t go round? There’s a rope cutter? Which is seized? Jam some grease into the grease nipple. No good? Blowlamp, then. Heat gun. WD40. Still no good? Big Stilsons? Puller? Whad day a mean, hammer? All right, all right. I think there’s one down at the bottom of the box. Give it a welt. There it goes!
Like I said. In the beginning was the hammer.