Pine Pine I t can be difficult nowadays to find pine trees of large enough diameter to provide the larger of some of the planks needed for constructing replicas. Cleaving has several advantages over sawing, being that the grain of the tree, in other words the cell tissue is followed and not crossed. Crossing these transverse cells with the saw as in modern or traditional boatbuilding actually damages their structure, opening them up to attack by whatever weevils may be lurking in the air or in the waters. Worse perhaps is that the structure of the wood is damaged at tissue level.
Wood remains strongest when kept in the original shape in which it grew.
Viking-ships are built using entirely fresh wood which means that it need not be weakened by drying nor further weakened by steaming to shape later. The twist in a cloven pine log All of these and many other features are the antithesis of the traditional boatbuilding technique, much of which will have to be forgotten. The Vikings used materials in such a way as to make use of their natural qualities, not to try to negate them as we have come to do nowadays. Pine actually twists as it grows and the natural shape of the twisted plank extracted by cleaving can be used to advantage to follow the graceful transition of each strake from horizontal to vertical in the fore and aft areas of the hull. Poland and Norway are the other areas.