Thursday, May 09, 2024

uguisu no tani watari

In response to my article, "Maybe Even Build A Boat" in the Hedgehog Review, Douglas Brooks, builder of Japanese boats, sent me this article about a boat he and students built at Harvard.

 https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/02/first-lesson-in-japanese-boatbuilding-dont-speak/

Brooks describes a feature that sets apart Japanese boatbuilding: edge nailing. In the West, “we tend to send the plank of the fastening through the planking into a frame or rib. There are no frames or ribs in Japanese boats. We’re ‘edge nailing’ the skin of the boat to itself.”

The percussive hammering method “has a very evocative name,” said Brooks. “It is called uguisu no tani watari, which means ‘the bush warbler flits back and forth across the valley.’ There’s a great risk of splitting the plank. It’s a really frightening way to drive a nail into a plank … It injects a kind of playfulness into the workshop.”

The article is well worth sharing.

1 comment:

  1. While the nailing and hammering thechniques are very interesting, what can be used while building other things in wood is the "suriawase" technique which allows to joint two boards. One will find many illustrations of this technique in various post of Douglas Brooks on
    http://blog.douglasbrooksboatbuilding.com/

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