Going with the grain: meet the Cork woodworker with 430k followers on TikTok

Corkman Eoin Reardon - aka CaptainBusyBollocks - tells the unvarnished truth about his social media success and the joy of working with his hands

Eoin Reardon, aka CaptainBusyBollocks: axe him no questions, and he'll tell you no lies. 

Lockdown and the resultant slowdown of the pace of life opened up new opportunities for many of us to find new hobbies, pastimes and consuming passions.

For Innishannon man and UCC commerce student Eoin Reardon, that new pursuit was woodworking - a bit of a left turn for a man who never studied woodwork in school, but an opportunity to garner appreciation for working with his hands.

With these newly-acquired skills, an appreciation for the art form, and the love of Irish traditions, there was only one thing for Reardon to do: build his own currach, of course.

"I'd always wanted to build a boat, and I remember in secondary school reading about currachs. They seemed fairly easy to make -  they could make them on the Aran Islands with feck-all wood and very primitive tools. 

"I didn't see why I wouldn't be able to do this in the back garden, with access to electricity. 

"So I said I'd give it a go anyway, and I scavenged the internet for whatever information I could find."

Eoin Reardon, aka CaptainBusyBollocks, out on his self-built currach. 

The only significant problem, as far as Reardon was concerned, is that he'd never so much as sat in one of the boats before building one.

"Ah, well, I found sketches of a Kilkee currach with measurements from the 1920s. It was 21 feet long, so I adapted those plans. 

"I reckoned if this was the design of an actual currach that floated, and if I followed this plan, then my own should as well."

In the process, he began a journey of discovery that seems custom-made for the modern-day social media experience, where many users and viewers are eschewing the stress of the news cycle in favour of 'slow' content on social media sites like TikTok, covering ideas like cleaning, organisation, and domestic projects.

Reardon talks about sharing his process on the Chinese-owned video titan, where he has more than 430,000 followers, and his content has garnered over 5m 'likes' - most of which have been garnered in the last 28 days. 

"I've been on it since the start of lockdown. I spent two years watching it - there are a few diamonds in the rough, it's a great platform. But then, about a month ago, I just uploaded a video of me using a hand plane and it got 7000 views. I was blown away by it - there was no target or anything. 

"But there were a lot of questions, asking about the tool, and a lot of people had never even seen one before. They're really interesting tools, there's a lot to talk about. 

"I made the two videos then, answering people's questions. And it was just a self-replicating cycle: more requests, more videos meant more questions, more questions, meant more videos, and so on and so forth."

Eoin Reardon, aka CaptainBusyBollocks, cuts into preconceptions about woodwork

In letting followers in on the minutiae of his learning curve, another opportunity presented itself - the flat-cap wearing character of CaptainBusyBollocks has surfaced and evolved over the course of his videos, an irreverent but loving nod and wink to the West Cork accent and mannerisms, that makes for an engaging guide to the worlds of woodwork and restoration.

"I wouldn't really want to watch someone if they were speaking in a monotone, so I just put a bit of enthusiasm into it. 

"I'd be lying if I said that's how I talk the whole time, but there's a lot of my own personality reflected in the character."

Eoin Reardon, aka CaptainBusyBollocks, observes his work.

As society continues to re-emerge from the pandemic, and people find places in the world for their newfound perspective and passions, the world is seemingly this young man's oyster. But where do you go with old-school skills in an ever-evolving landscape?

"The big dream, over the long-term, would be to manufacture traditional Irish furniture, and stuff like that, because I've really gotten into the woodworking." 

But in the short term over the next few years, he's planning on building another currach, the Kerry Naomh Óg. "I'd like to roll that around the country - but that's on the to-do list."

• Follow Eoin Reardon on TikTok - @pintofplane