Slept over at Butser yesterday. Regular work during the day and after I sat and carve a spoon. We had a barbecue and a few beers later. Stayed up until 1:30. I slept in the Moel y Gerddi roundhouse by myself which was rather nice. It was surprisingly comfortable, though sleep didn't come that easily. Great experience though.
So work on the boat has been troublesome. We didn't do much yesterday except start place coal in concentrated areas in inside rings of clay. We left the coals burning the entire day and night and we're still not seeing results in the softening of the wood. It just doesn't penetrate deep enough for some reason. However, we did make progress the following morning when we all woke up. I stayed around to clear away the coals on one side, which indeed we found to have not really helped at all, and started using the new bone one or two of the volunteers made. Although the burning doesn't help, the bone tool itself is a rather viable method of removing material. So as we sat there thinking what to do we decided to try and use the bone adze as a chisel. We got a large mallet and chiselled away at the wood and it's surprisingly effective. So that's the plan. We're actually going to be doing less burning, but more labour intensive material removal work. I believe the a few of the volunteers will be making some more bone tools. That's the method we're going to be using from now on. If we prehistoric man couldn't burn it, they perhaps could have just chipped away at it. We really spent a lot of time trying to do the burn, but have gotten no results. We're obviously on a deadline too, so we need to change things. I don't know if I mentioned this before but we were using bronze adzes just a bit on one of the days, and I felt a little bad about it because it's not authentic. However, now with our own home made bone tools we can really get to work, especially using this chisel method. We also should be getting proper stone tools later.
I believe there will be a write up on the blog later. I'll post more photos later.
Just as a side note, despite not being about the boat, I worked more with the sheep yesterday. We were worming them. Well, I wasn't, but I was in charge of keep them in place and managing them. It was quite an interesting experience. Especially when two escaped and I had to chase them down, grab them by the horns and escort them back to their pens. They are lovely animals though. Two of the younger ones kept crowding around us as I believe they were bottle fed and very much liked us.
We decided to try and isolate the heat, so we used clay rings.
Charcoal was put in this ring, whereas on the other side of the boat we resumed regular log burning, although later on all sections had coal on.
After we set the burns up I was assigned the task of managing the livestock for a while.
We tested out the new bone adze a little bit yesterday. Tomorrow morning, just before I left, would see the breakthrough proper of using this tool as a chisel. (I didn't get any pictures of that as my phone has lost battery, but there may be an official update on that soon)
Burgers, sausages and rabbit.
My sleep setup.
I'll be going back tommorow, so it'll be interesting to see what they've done with the bone tools. Up until now we've removed very little material by labour. It's just been a case of waiting for the burns to try and penetrate the wood and then testing a few tools here and there, but now we're going to be using the bone adzes almost exclusively. Burns may still occur, but it doesn't seem worth the time and maintenance efforts.
