From tree to sea
Tim Loftus has been building boats for twenty years and specialises in wooden boat design, build and repair. He currently runs his own business from the historic Underfall Yard in Hotwells, Bristol. I popped down one December morning to talk about his process and craft.
On the outside of the shed, that’s how I start the design. I can’t draw so I whittle a wooden model. That’s how boat builders would have done it. The naval architects and proper boat designers only appeared in the last hundred years, maybe a little bit before that. But before that, boat builders that would whittle a model and they’d change things incrementally so it would evolve. So someone could say “I like that design, but maybe make it a bit finer there and slightly fuller there” and you could make those changes in 3D. To make those changes on a computer is quite labour intensive, I think. I could just scrape a bit away with a chisel until it looks right. From
that, you can scale up to the right size and make line drawings of three different views. The process of scaling the lines up full-size is called lofting and that was the loft floor, those sheets of ply. We thought rather than buy some more ply for the side of the shed, we’d nail the loft floor on. In a really big old yard, the loft floor would have been sacred and left clean all the time but we haven’t got that space, so we’ve had to stack it up. It’s worked really well because we can check measurements continually with it on the side of the shed. It’s quite open and people do quite like seeing what’s going on, it’s not what you expect in the middle of the city.
It’s not what you expect in the middle of a city.
Tim, the guy who commissioned this boat, he was just passing by, would never have met him otherwise I can’t imagine. It didn’t even dawn on him that he wanted a boat until he stopped and chatted, so he wasn’t going to go to a website and order one. He is calling it Cubbage wood which is named after the wood he bought to build it from. The trees were planted around a hundred years ago and are now so big that the wood needs ‘thinning out’ to give room for new trees and to allow older trees to continue growing, so we were just part of that process. He’s a really nice fella, he’s been working with me on it for the whole year. I think he’s enjoying it. He fancies taking it to the Mediterranean.
To build a boat like this is a years work generally, about 4,500 hours. We’re going to start another one in January so this one will slow down considerably while we’ll get the other one done and then move back onto this one again. It’s a very old fashioned design, it’s like you might have found in the 1930s but slightly modernised so it’s much wider than it would have been in the 30s. It’s not very ambitious but they’re not common these sort of builds. There might be other people I don’t know about, but I don’t think there’s anyone else building one at the moment in the uk so it is unusual. We drew it two months ago, but most of the time has been taken up nipping up and down to pick trees out and get them sawn up. So we set it up about three weeks ago, so it’s coming together quite quickly. It slows right down when we start planking,
you can’t believe how tediously slow that is. There are about twenty-two planks on each side and each one is completely different. You’d be very lucky to get more than one on in a day. There’s different ways to obtain the curves in the wood. In Britain the oak trees tend to be quite curvy so for the big ships, they would saw the curves out of curvy bits of oak tree. The outside planking is just bent around with brute force, steam or heat. If you go down and look at The Matthew, you’ll see an example of something that really is a period ship where the structure is quite visible. The slightly more modern framing that we’ll use on Cubbage Wood is the steam bending of the oak which is very quick but there’s a lot of input setting it up. All this is stacked away once we’re done with the boat and if no-one orders another one then we’ll have to cut it up
or use it for something else. So I guess the old-timers would have been perhaps a bit bemused by that.
These are the sockets where the bottoms of the frames will go in and then we’ll bend them around. We’ll probably get, if we’re lucky, one-hundred frames in next week. Whereas sawing them out, that might take a month. So it’s quick but there’s a big input to get there beforehand. These days people laminate a lot so they’ll cut the wood up into dozens of thin strips, bend it with glue and let the glue harden off. It’s funny, people would start laminating frames on this, and again that would take you a month, so that’s an interesting example where they’ve forgotten an old technique which is still an applicable technique. So there’s tar between the joints and great big bolts.
The oak frames will go in, and we’ll plank over it with planks of larch, which each have to be sculpted out to fit into that curve. We’ll plane that curve into them and then they fit butted together. Then it’s just fit a plank, fit a plank, fit a plank. Then cork those seams with cotton which you hammer in between the planks, which swells up when the boat goes in the water, keeping it waterproof. It goes around the bolt heads as well so the water can’t creep up the bolt heads. Again, people that sell modern sealants can’t believe it, but it’s the only way if you want to keep this thing floating for 100 years, which it should do, then it’s the best.
It’s brilliant. It’s really nice to get away from having an engine.
That grey bit’s lead, so that’s two-and-aquarter tonnes of lead which we cast up which keeps it upright while she’s sailing along. Once we’d got it drawn up fullsize, I could work out how much ballast it needed and where it would float. With this one we worked out the total displacement which is the volume of water that displaces when it’s floating on its waterline, where you want it to float. On a boat like this, the ratio of ballast to the total displacement is normally about 30-40%. The total boat displacement would be five tonnes and so I made the ballast two-and-a-quarter, which seemed about right. Normally there would be an engine, but the owner told me he’s not having one which makes our lives a lot simpler. It will have a sail and possibly an electric outboard which he’s quite comfortable with. It’s brilliant. It’s really nice to get away from having an engine.
It’s nice to do it all in-house. It’s almost simpler that you have control over the whole shebang. These days it works better for me to be able to do the mechanicals and the electrics. It saves a lot of money. I build the masts on the floor. It starts as a great big tree which is cut down, cut it square, octahedron, sixteen sides, thirty-two sides, then just keep knocking corners off until you end up with a round mast. It’s a really nice process. I normally try to do it with the same crane that launches the boat, so it’s one of the last things I do. I’ve never dabbled in the modern way of boatbuilding. There are guys here that do composites work which is pretty much where all the boatbuilding work is these days, I mean, fibreglass and carbon fibre. But it’s really a pretty unhealthy industry to be in, unless you’re working for a really high end company. I mean if you’re working for
Airbus, they’ll look after you. But when you’re a small business working for yourself it’s very dusty, very chemically. I mean, this is very dusty, and no dust is good dust, but it’s not so bad. It’s really pretty gruesome work I think, whereas this is what I enjoy. When fibreglass came in in the 1960s, people stopped buying wooden boats for a while and so people stopped making them. Then there’s an experience gap from about 1970 to now. So in the 60s the industry was at its peak and there were dozens and dozens of people that were really very good, the standards were amazing. You could go to any number of yards and do an apprenticeship, be trained up. But now that’s gone, and there’s a big knowledge gap. There’s no oldtimers that did an apprenticeship and then worked their way up through so I guess that’s meant that there’s no-one to build them and then there’s nobody buying them anyway.
But that’s slowly changing. There have been a few characters that have tried to rejuvenate it and it’s great for that. I’ve been pretty lucky, I’ve been at it for 20 years now and always been building a boat so that’s pretty lucky I would say in the industry as a whole.
I did a Geology degree at university but I didn’t use it at all. I ended up with four friends who also graduated at the same time – we weren’t sure what to do with ourselves so we bought a boat and learnt to sail. We set off around the world to see what we could find. One by one they all found things or dropped out so I ended up with the boat in the Caribbean. I ended up working in a boat yard in Trinidad and really enjoyed it. The penny dropped. I kind of knew that it would be something like this. It’s quite nice as it’s got all the different elements; you’re never doing one thing for too long. There’s metal work, there’s mechanics, there’s electrics, woodwork. I need that constant change. So I came back and you can actually do a course, which is where the knowledge gap has been replaced, but the boat building schools used to recruit retired, old-school boat builders and they’re
properly retired now, they’re in their 80s and deserve a break. So you’ve still not got that link. They kind of recruit their exstudents which I think is possibly missing something. But I did the course and it was really good, then I went into partnership with some guys up in Scotland, building boats in Ullapool which is right up in the north-west, about fifty miles from the top of the west coast. Then I had my own business when I left there. I spent three or four years in Edinburgh, then moved to Bristol, so I’ve been here in Bristol for seven years now.