Barnacle Bill Magazine March 2016 issue 3 | Page 34

34 The Bosun’s Mate Given that boat building, even of a modest design, is time consuming and has cost implications, especially if you live in a part of the world where timber and ply are pricey, it is worth taking your time and doing the best job you can. This often means it is worth consideri ng investing in a few quality tools before starting. Using decent tools can be the difference between completing the job or filling the garage or shed with a pile of wood and half finished projects that end up on the bonfire after 10 years. It can be the difference between spending hours sanding and just having to touch up a surface with a plane. Sharp, well maintained and suitable tools are also considerably safer to use. You are far more likely to injure yourself using a blunt chisel than you are a sharp one, why? Because a blunt one will require more force and if that force moves laterally when applied the blade can slip and the tool bury itself into your thigh, if you are really unlucky, into an artery. Cheap and nasty saws. When affordable power saws started to become ubiquitous in the west about 30 years ago the DIY hand saw market saw a considerable decline in demand. This in turn resulted in cheaper and cheaper saws being mass produced. Now most ‘western’ saws are stamped out on presses with the teeth in situ, the stamping process creating the edge on each tooth. Whilst OK for cutting up an old chair for firewood, saws like this are next to useless for our purposes, yes, you can use them but it will be very difficult to keep the cut straight, the saw will blunt quickly and the teeth are so rough that the cut edge will require excessive treatment with a decent block plane to get it smooth and square, if you don’t own a decent saw, you are unlikely to own a decent block plane. However, there was still a demand for new saws but increasingly in the USA and in the UK, this demand was being met by the Japanese who, with their culture of timber framing and complex wooden joints, had never given up mass producing quality saws. As the historic stock of quality western saws made up until the 1970s wore out, was lost or hoarded by jealous owners and quality saw making in the west ceased almost disappearing, in the case of western back saws. Customers who wanted to do carpentry still needed quality hand saws to make some cuts, in particular, tenon cuts, increasingly Japanese saws became the affordable solution. I can recall a woodwork teacher friend in the early 1990s prizing the 100 year old set of 24 identical Sheffield made tenon saws he had in his classroom and he warned his pupils about the dire punishments that were meted out to anyone who dropped one, what the penalty for breaking a tooth was, he never told them because the answer was too terrifying. His reason for this was because to replace the 24 saws with similar quality saws in 1993 would have cost an absolute fortune, the manufacture of them had moved back to the craftsman already by then. None of the major tool manufacturers were producing really good quality mass produced saws. At that time, unless you parted with a lot of money, your best bet was to trawl car boot sales and friend’s garages for quality antique saws. Over the last 15 years we have seen resurgence in western saw making with quality saws once again made to western designs. A new set of quality western saws has become an option again. Power saws for boat building. When I founded Barnacle Bill Magazine, I did so in part to encourage my fellow countrymen to start building boats again. As I wrote the business plan I factored in a workshop in an industrial estate complete with table saws, drill presses, hoists and all the toys you see in a modern professional carpentry shop. Until I realised that to do this would be of no benefit to my readers at all. No, what I needed to do was to only invest in those tools that the home based amateur boat builder would consider acceptable in terms of space, cost and ease of