The Pen Makers Boat: #500 Now Sold

NB Birchills Oak and Chrome Ballpoint Twist Pen

(£2.50 from the sale of this pen will be gifted to The Black Country Living Museum, the Custodians of NB Birchills)

EUROPEAN OAK - Quercus robur

Usually straight-grained, the heartwood of European Oak varies in colour from light tan to brown. Quarter-sawn pieces show attractive flame figuring. The wood is fairly hard, heavy and dense, clean but with the occasional knot. European Oak is a beautiful timber and with an oil finish, the grain will turn a deep golden brown.

This particular piece of oak (probably English rather than European) is just a little bit special though. It comes from the rear cabin side gunwales and roof hatch of Narrowboat Birchills. I was given a few off cuts by the superb craftsmen who were carrying out a little light refurbishment to this historic boat, in fact the guys had cut the whole back cabin off!

Birchills is an historic, ‘Joey’ boat with a small day cabin, built in 1953 by Ernest Thomas of Walsall, ‘Birchills’ it is one of the last wooden day boats made and was used to carry coal to Wolverhampton Power Station. This boat is double-ended and the mast and rudder could be changed from one end to the other. This enabled its use in narrow canals or basins where there was no room to turn the boat around.

The rotten parts of these rebuilt boats are usually used to stoke the fires that steam the new planks for bending to the hulls shape so half a day later this flaky gunwale would have been burned. I wasn't sure how deep the rot would have gone and how deep I would have to delve into this piece to find stable wood. The pens I make from historic boat materials have been thoroughly tested by me to make sure that they will give pleasurable daily use.

That old flaky gunwale went on to make a few very nice pens and I was lucky enough to be given some more wood by Ade at A P Boat Building in Alvecote. This time a piece that appears to be from the old red cabin hatch surround.

Leaving Penkridge a day earlier than we may have liked (visitor moorings are often restricted to 48 hours only) we wound our way to to Autherley Junction via Gailey and its well known round toll-keepers watch tower. This piece of canal is particularly twisty being a little older and a contour (literally follows the contour of the hills) rather than the much straighter cutting and embankment style that we would soon be going on to. In fact we passed a very modern looking recycling centre complete with living turfed roof and we were still twisting and turning around the back of it about an hour later.

The only other notable feature of the canal towards the end of our journey was a mile or so of what was labeled on our map as ‘very narrow cutting’. It certainly was too. Long sections where the canal was about six inches wider than the boat, and shallow too. It is fine as long as there aren't any boats coming the other way, or you are unlucky enough to break down - ah spoken too soon. Yes we came to a grinding halt in the narrows, our prop was fouled and not with the usual bin bags or a random T-shirt that would have allowed us to carry on but something big and heavy and noisy as the prop tried to swing itself around.

We are quite used to rushing down the engine hole to see what's gone wrong but it takes a couple of minutes to take the deck boards up, then move a wood bench off the engine covers so there is a bit of room and get down to the weed hatch which is about a foot below deck level, then unscrew the heavy steel bar that holds the weed hatch in place before the delights of the murky canal await another six inches lower. Now what is down there? Far too murky to see so its roll the sleeves up and dive into the unknown. This time it was a large and heavy rope fender that was jammed between the prop and the rudder, complete with a plastic bracket to hold it to a narrowboat roof. What was annoying is that this was entirely avoidable as a narrowboats fenders should really be raised when you are moving and just put down for mooring. Every year there are stories of boats wedged into narrow locks because their fenders took up the valuable spare couple of inches down the side of the boat.

After our delay in the narrows we arrived at Autherley Junction (on the borders of Wolverhampton) just as the sun was dipping down and changing our warm spring cruise into one that was threatening a frost for the next day. Not an inspiring location and the one and only reason that we wanted to spend at least a few days here is that there is a nice solid concrete bank and a turning point at the junction and we would be able to spend a little TLC on our boats paintwork. The battle scars of 2015 were still showing and needed a couple of coats of primer, some undercoat and some rather expensive enamel blue topcoat.

Luckily the weather was fab and I was able to get a few pens finished too.

Pen #500 was turned at Autherley Junction on 20th April 2016