Slowly working their way through twelve feet of solid timber

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 79.

The frigates were probably the most technologically complex pieces of machinery that existed in the America of 1794, with every part made by hand: iron bolts up to twenty feet long, forged one at a time by blacksmiths; 150,000 treenails, wooden pegs as much as four feet long that were slowly hammered into augered holes to fasten planks together, their ends then split and wedged to hold them tight; more than a thousand pulley blocks of varying dimensions, their sheaves made of ultra-hard lignum vitae. Every plank was sawn over a sawpit, one man in the pit below and another standing on the timber above, each working one end of a two-man saw; large frames were roughed out with an ax, then finished with an adze, which when swung at arm’s length by a skilled master shipwright could shave a whisker off a huge timber in exactly the right spot. Each of the longest of the hundreds of thousands of holes that needed to be drilled might take two men a week to complete by slowly working their way through twelve feet of solid timber, constantly backing the auger out to clear the chips, and finally running a heated iron through the finished hole to leave a smooth, hardened, and somewhat water- and decay-resistant surface. Copper bolts used below the waterline were not threaded but had to be secured by “upsetting” their ends, working them with hammers to form a flattened head. Rope had to be spun and tarred, decks caulked with a ton of oakum and a dozen barrels of pitch, sails cut and sewn. The building of the ship went on outside, in all weather. Yet when all went well it could be done start to finish in a year, even a ship the size of one of Humphreys’s large frigates.