Sorry but it is the Falmouth Sea Shanty Festival this weekend. So how is the project going? Very slow and time consuming but somewhere in these photos is an emerging sculpture.

the moulds

just a few home made clamps

there’s a sculpture in there somewhere

looks fishy

I’m not sure how much an artist ought to reveal of his work before it’s finished. Any opinions? That’s my workshop by the way. It’s a pokey, leaky, draughty, dusty garage a few hundred yards from my house but Ken Bruce and Steve Wright are in there with me most days at the moment. Those cramps are very easy to make and have been invaluable ever since I used them to build a plywood clinker boat 15 years ago. The most expensive part is the threaded metal loop which is normally used for tensioning fence wire. They cost about a pound. They are great for getting a screwdriver in for extra tension. The long noses of these cramps enable me to get into difficult corners. I guess you could make these any length and thickness you like for specialist jobs. Compared with a metal carpenters cramp they are cheap. I have a box of 20 of them and often use them all on a gluing jobs. I glued small cork pads (cut from cheap coasters) to the jaws of each cramp. That way the jaws don’t mark the wood and if they get glued to the work the cork easily breaks away and is easier to sand away.

a homemade cramp