Don't let machines steal good work

Video transcript:

I'm really not against progress, but sometimes I think progress can actually hit us right in the butt.

It's like, machinery: Working with machinery and making stuff automatically and in factories can be really great, because you know you can get a lot of stuff built really fast.

But sometimes I think the machinery actually, you know, steals the good work. All the satisfying all the fun work is stolen by the machinery. You know, cutting the joints by hand, feeling the shavings curl out of your hand plane. All that stuff has you know in a way gone missing after the machinery has taken over everything.

So I do use machinery, right? Because I think machinery can be a great help in taking away all the drudgery, taking away all the boring work in woodworking. But I really try not to use machinery to do the fun tasks.

So I use a bandsaw for example for cutting up my rough lumber, because cutting up rough lumber by hand is just ... it really feels like work. And I use a thickness planer for getting a nice smooth board.

But the joinery, I try to cut by hand. All the chamfers and all the edges and all the fine work I try to do by hand. Both because in many cases when you build a boat it's actually faster, but also because, you know, it's just fun. I want to do that work. I don't want the machinery to steal it from me.

So you could definitely build a wooden boat using only machines. But it will probably take you a lot longer to do. It will probably take you a lot longer than building it by hand, at least if you build just one boat - which is what most of us would want to do at a time.

So you could ... like take a boat plank in a lapstrake boat. A lapstrake boat is where the planks overlap and you want to cut a bevel on one plank to make it fit the next one. This bevel is changing all the time across the entire length of the boat. For a canoe, it could be three or four meters. It changes constantly, and cutting this bevel with a block plane can be done in say 20 minutes, but if you want to set up a machine to cut that bevel, it would take you several days probably to set it up.

Once you've done that setup of course you could cut 20 planks in maybe an hour or 20 minutes, I don't know. You could do it really fast if you wanted to do production work, but setting it up would take immense amounts of time.

And actually one of the reasons I wanted to get into boatbuilding instead of, say, cabinet making or furniture making is the fact that you really need to use hand tools to work efficiently - at least when you're doing one-off work.

Like if you only make boxes and square stuff, then it's so easy to go to the table saw or to go to the chop saw and make your perfect 90-degree cuts. When you do boatbuilding there are no two parts that fit together 90 degrees, almost. You know everything is at odd angles, so doing that cut on a machine is often a lot harder than doing it by hand, actually.

And that's what's, you know, great I think about boat building, that actually the hand tools make sense. Also from an efficiency perspective. But definitely also from an "enjoying the process" perspective.

- Mikkel Pagh