CRAFTSMANSHIP Adrian Morgan
which milkmaids in white smocks once squatted on milking stools. During the search I found all sorts of things thought lost and now, with Mattis’ red-handled jobs and my motley collection, we could clamp (or is that cramp?) pretty much anything we wanted.
Terrible tool envy B
oxes arrive by every post. Courier vans queue to unload at Viking Boats’ purpose-built shed at Leckmelm (purposely built in 1880, that is, to milk cows). Blue and green boxes (I like the blue ones better) and cardboard boxes of all sizes pile up inside. Mattis, who can in no way be called an apprentice, since it is he who has been teaching me so much, is getting tooled up.
He is off to Norway to build bigger boats in pine, and has been ordering all the stuff he needs before he goes. I can’t help but feel envious as I curse an ancient ratchet clamp, while he whips out something brand new, tough and shiny with a red handle.
Starting from scratch, buying stuff, is a luxury that
Viking Boats cannot afford, making do with old and, it has to be said, mainly trusty tools that have stood the test of time but which, like old friends, have their annoying traits. Such as one-handed ratchet clamps that only work for part of their length and lack the rubbery bits that stop the feet slipping.
And yes, they are right: you cannot have too many clamps. The other day, when we bent the steamed gunwales round the inside of the sheerstrakes, we scoured the farm for clamps. Cries of “I’ve found another one” echoed from the Victorian rafters under
“They are right: you cannot have too many
clamps” Familiar friends pale in comparison, Adrian discovers
Aside from c(r/l)amps, Mattis has been amassing a small, high-spec armoury of electric weaponry, in sturdy plastic boxes with handles. Many of these boxes stack, for the manufacturers are canny and would have us buy lots of them to be piled up like Marshall amps at a Queen concert. The Bosch boxes come in a fetching shade of blue; boxes strong enough to stand any number of other, er... boxes on top. The Makita boxes and tools nestling in moulded pockets therein, like curled-up mice, are a contrasting blue, which designates professional quality as against green ones for DIY (which we disdain, naturally). Mattis is building a fine arsenal of machinery that spins at ridiculous speeds and take off micro- millimetres of wood at each pass or, if wound down, your finger. Now, instead of reaching for the
finely-tuned block plane he has spent hours honing, it’s out with the Makita electric planer. He claims it’s much easier on the end grain and other spurious excuses. I know the truth: he just wants to use his new toys, and who can blame him? It is an incontrovertible truth that blokes like machines, whether a yellow Porsche 911 or a British racing green Makita KP0810K/2. Once the heady note of the boxer engine gets into your blood – and it must be the same for an electric planer (or router or sander or, or...); the hum of the motor, the power at your fingertips – you are lost. All I know is that picking up an inert bit of steel and bronze, that has to be sharpened too often, now pales in comparison. There must be an equivalent term for ‘petrolhead’ in the world of electric tools. It’s envy really. My electric planer (yes, I do have one) came off the back of a lorry, literally: an itinerant tool salesman in a white Transit van turned up at the precise moment I was cursing the prospect of hand planing a centreboard. Uncanny timing, and he caught me at my least wary, leaving with £60 in cash for a Chinese job worth a tenner, with a dodgy blade and hideous screeching tone. Maybe it was the box that seduced me. Green? Blue? No, a fetching shade of red, the colour of cheap lipstick.
CLASSIC BOAT JUNE 2012 91
CHARLOTTE WATTERS
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