Today’s post about boat building on Inle Lake was written by guest blogger and traveling companion Dan Kenney, who has spent many chilly New England spring days working to make a wooden boat seaworthy.

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We visited a small family-run boat-building business where men made the everyday work boats used on the lake. Their outdoor work yard included a roofed-overopen-air section.

The boats are made of solid two-inch thich teak planks and are custom-ordered, with the price based on the length of the boat.

The only tools we saw were a hand plane, a hand auger, a hammer, and a hand saw. The methods and techniques these boat builders used could have been passed on from generation to generation for hundreds of years.

This man is cutting a thin strip of teak from a piece of saved scrap wood. He is preparing to scarf (or splice) it into a larger, long plank in order to make the plank usable for a particular fit. He’s putting in this effort  because teak has become too expensive just to cut a new plank whenever an existing one isn’t quite right.

Next, he planes the piece in order to get an exact fit.

As I supervise, the piece is now drilled. Screws are countersunk to fit it seamlessly into the plank.

The seams of this almost-finished boat are now coated with something, perhaps pitch, to make them waterproof. Below, two boats are almost finished and ready for delivery.

Interestingly, the whole basic frame of the boat is made of only five planks of wood. Because the wood planks are very wide and the boats, shallow, these boats don’t need a lot of planks. Fewer planks mean fewer seams, and fewer seams require less work. If more planks were needed to complete the side of the boat, they would also need ribs to hold these side planks together, but in these boats the sides are each made of just one wide plank.