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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2385 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 20, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This video is in Russian, but quite educational and entertaining even if you don't know the language. A bunch of reenactors have been trying to build a dugout boat in the old Slavic/Varangian style:

De Administrando Imperio details how the Slavs built monoxyla that they sold to Rus' in Kiev. These boats were then used against the Byzantine Empire during the Rus'–Byzantine Wars of the 9th and 10th centuries. They used dugouts to attack Constantinople and to withdraw into their lands with bewildering speed and mobility. Hence, the name of Δρομίται ("people on the run") applied to the Rus in some Byzantine sources. The monoxyla were often accompanied by larger galleys, that served as command and control centres. Each Slavic dugout could hold from 40 to 70 warriors.

I have no idea how big of a tree one would need to make a dugout for 70 warriors, but making a smaller boat out of a nine-ton oak using period-appropriate tools and tech looks like it a lot of effort. No idea why they didn't burn out the interior and decided to chop it all out, though.

How would you burn out the interior into the desired thickness and shape?

Very carefully, like this. It's not about burning it all the way to the required thickness, it's about removing most of the wood on the inside without having eight guys hack at it with adzes.

I don't really know much about canoe construction but this guy said that the burning is so slow going that they're just going to hack at it instead (9:20 timestamp).

Interesting - YouTube's automatic closed caption translations did a very admirable job handling this video. Some terms and turns of phrase throw it off, but I definitely got the gist of 80%+ of the spoken information content here. More than I expected.

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