New Workplaces

Now that the many pieces of the do-it-yourself kit were ready, the real building of the Orm could get underway.
The garage wasn’t big enough anymore because the Orm would be ten meters long, so Henri went looking for a new workspace.
He turned to the farmers in his area for help, and different ones offered him working space in their empty barns for the summer months.

The Orm during the building

He would have to work fast, though, because the barns would be needed again in the fall.
So, Henri spent evenings, weekends, and holidays working against the autumn deadline.
He used thousands of copper screws, an equal number of small nails, hundreds of meters of sandpaper, and hundreds of liters of varnish.
Sometimes the area looked like a busy professional shipyard business, but the only "employee" was Henri, who worked on alone.

The Orm during the building

The Mast

A wooden ship’s mast for a Viking ship isn’t the kind of thing you can just go and pick up in a store and Henri had to solve the problem of where he was going to find a long, straight tree trunk.
Sometimes, though, luck gives you a helping hand, and that’s what happened in this case.
Henri is a land surveyor and, by sheer chance, he found out that the telephone poles in a particular area of the city were about to be replaced.
He was able to buy one of the old poles, and that was another problem solved.
The telephone pole was put aside to dry and about a year later Henri was finally able to start working on it.
The whole outer part of the pole had to be planed down, right to the heartwood.
After one year of duty the mast become to tear in the longdirection, till the centre of the mast.
It appears that the old telephone-pool who had served for so many years, has been soaked with rainwater,that one year of drying wasn’t enough.
The forces on the mast can be enormous, specialy with gusts of wind.
To rule out the possibility of a mast-break Henri has made a new mast, from new and good dry wood.

The making of the mast

The Trailer

Building the ship wasn’t Henri’s only preoccupation.
He also had to start thinking about how he was going to transport the Orm and he knew he wouldn’t be able to use a standard trailer because of Orm ’s rather special measurements.

The beginning of the trailer

Of course, a specialty company could build a custom-made trailer, but the cost would be way too high.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention,and Henri proved it once again.
Someone offered him a burnt-out trailer and he grabbed it.
The trailer was taken apart, leaving much of the undercarriage intact.
Then Henri got to work transforming it into the custom-built trailer he needed so badly.
As if the job wasn’t complicated enough, he also had to make sure that the trailer conformed to Dutch transport regulations so that he could take it on the road.
It wasn’t easy, but it got done.

The trailer is ready

The End Comes into Sight

Once the trailer was complete and the Orm’s hull built, it could be put on the trailer.
This was accomplished with the help of many people.
After that, Henri started working on the inside of the Orm, measuring and making all the parts that couldn’t be made in advance because of the need for exact measurements: rowing benches, deck planks, cupboards and planking.
It was a repetitive procedure; climb in, measure, climb out, saw, climb in, fit,climb out, adjust....
At last the work was done - well, almost done.
The entire ship had to be varnished to protect the wood from the weather.
A couple of layers wasn’t going to do the trick, though, because the wood was only 5 mm thick, which meant that nothing could be sanded and re-varnished.
In the end it took nine layers on every plank and in every nook and cranny.

The Orm on the trailer for the first time

All the work, the time, the cost and the effort it took to build the Orm was worth it to Henri.
This was the fulfilment of his dream.
He knew that if he were given the choice of starting again, knowing what it would take, he would do it again, setting out with the same passion and commitment.

[ last updated :  22-10-2021 ]

© Copyright H.A. Houben