NB Birchills Oak and Gun Metal Premium Twist Pen
A donation 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.
Pen #596 was turned on 13th July 2016 at The Barclaycard Arena, Birmingham
We left Chester headed for Birmingham the day after Chester floating market and a lovely evening in the pub with fellow trading colleagues. Luckily we had a dry run up through the locks for I think the first time. As we rounded the corner to the second lock a boat coming our direction let us know there was another boat waiting to share the lock with us around the next corner, lo and behold it turned out to be our friends Scooby and Rita, a very pleasant surprise and we shared the rest of the lock flight with them.
We had quite a long way to go over the next few days and the plan was to clear the Shropshire Union Canal as soon as possible. We would normally spend at least a couple of weeks through the pleasant Shropshire countryside but three days later we had cleared Junction and were half a mile away from the bottom lock of the Wolverhampton 21 flight.
We just made it to the bottom lock early the next morning as a sleepy looking holiday boat crew came onto their back deck to ready themselves for the flight. Unfortunately the Wolverhampton flight of 21 locks are narrow so we weren't able to share, we did manage it in a great time though and we’d cleared the top lock well before 10:30. A short while later we were moored for the night in Tipton and treated ourselves to a Sunday night curry at one of the best value Indian restaurants that we've been to. Next stop was Birmingham City Centre where we would spend a few days before heading out through Bournville and tackling the Lapworth and nasty Hatton flights to get to Saltisford Arm in Warwick which was going to be a stop-over for a week while we went down to Poole to visit our daughter.
You can follow my pen making here on this blog and our travels on another blog here
We left Chester headed for Birmingham the day after Chester floating market and a lovely evening in the pub with fellow trading colleagues. Luckily we had a dry run up through the locks for I think the first time. As we rounded the corner to the second lock a boat coming our direction let us know there was another boat waiting to share the lock with us around the next corner, lo and behold it turned out to be our friends Scooby and Rita, a very pleasant surprise and we shared the rest of the lock flight with them.
We had quite a long way to go over the next few days and the plan was to clear the Shropshire Union Canal as soon as possible. We would normally spend at least a couple of weeks through the pleasant Shropshire countryside but three days later we had cleared Junction and were half a mile away from the bottom lock of the Wolverhampton 21 flight.
We just made it to the bottom lock early the next morning as a sleepy looking holiday boat crew came onto their back deck to ready themselves for the flight. Unfortunately the Wolverhampton flight of 21 locks are narrow so we weren't able to share, we did manage it in a great time though and we’d cleared the top lock well before 10:30. A short while later we were moored for the night in Tipton and treated ourselves to a Sunday night curry at one of the best value Indian restaurants that we've been to. Next stop was Birmingham City Centre where we would spend a few days before heading out through Bournville and tackling the Lapworth and nasty Hatton flights to get to Saltisford Arm in Warwick which was going to be a stop-over for a week while we went down to Poole to visit our daughter.
You can follow my pen making here on this blog and our travels on another blog here
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