While the world economy as a whole might be circling the drain and every other country is having watercanon fights with its citizens, here in Alameda, we are making do with what we have, namely, leftover stuff from the times of plenty. All this sort of thing is given catchy names like upcycling, diverting the waste stream, etc. what it comes down to is that if you can't afford new stuff, you might want to use some old stuff instead. And so the dog - woman boat featured a few posts back was made almost entirely out of old stuff, not as a stunt but out of necessity, the necessity being that when money is scarce, you make do by other means.
The builder, Inka had access to various pieces of cast off wood from her building jobs and the skin of the boat was made of scraps that I had left from other boat projects that Inka then sewed together on a friend's sewing maching. For the coaming rims, we scavenged some branches from weed trees in the neighborhood and when it was all done, we had a boat that for the most part wasn't that much different from a boat that we would have built had we used all new materials.
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| Skin of sewn-together pieces from other projects, giving the boat a traditional look, although from a distance, you can hardly see the seams. |
And that in a nutshell is what boat building in the Arctic was like in the old days. You had to scrounge all the stuff you made your boats out of. Takes a little more time than buying everything fresh at the boat supply store, but worth it, especially when you have more time than money.
So if you have more time than money, contact me and I will tell you how to make a boat from found materials.
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