The Hiltons noticed two basic patterns of traditional shipbuilding. In each case, the builder laid the keel and fastened the ribs to it. Planks were fastened to the skeleton either by nailing or "sewing."
The Hiltons notes that in the "nailing" method, the builder drilled a hole through the plank and rib with an iron-tipped hand drill. Through the hole, he drove a large iron spike; a packing of coconut fibers soaked in fish oil encircled the shaft under the large head. The spike was then bent over on the inside to cinch the nail in place. They watched while a native shipbuilder placed the rib, marked it, and hewed it to the line with an adze, installed it and nailed it in place by drilling holes and setting each nail head in the wood, then clinching it on the inside. He had not power tools, only ancient hand tools. He used Jumaise (Sycamore) logs for ribs, but flat lumber from India or Indonesia for planks and iron nails. He said that a ship of the size he was making (20 meters) could easily carry over a hundred people on a journey such as the Hiltons had described for Nephi's group.
One reason the Astons looked beyond the village of Salalah for the ship-building site was that big trees for the ship's timbers were several miles away from the beach. However, in building his own ship, Nephi could have cut down trees and dragged them to the sandy beach using camel power, or he could have purchased dressed lumber from the local people. Nephi does not tell us how he got his timbers, but he does comment that the completed ship "was good, and that the workmanship thereof was exceeding fine" (1 Nephi 18:4).
As the Hiltons have noted before, Nephi did not build the ship "after the manner of men," but "after the manner which the Lord had shown unto" him (1 Nephi 18:2). Their examination of ancient shipbuilding serves only to illustrate that Nephi's acquaintance with contemporary construction techniques "after the manner of men" was extensive. He built in an area where shipbuilding was well-known. Indeed, even though his ship was not "after the manner of men," he probably used a number of the methods and elements of design or building techniques known to the people of his time, the Lord directing him in unstated ways to make a ship different enough to be able to carry them on the extraordinary trip across the Indian and Pacific Oceans to America.
While nails had been known and used at least 400 years before Nephi's day, there is no indication they were used in ship-building. The earliest texts make it abundantly clear that early ships were sewed. However, if Nephi built the first nailed ocean-going vessel while the local Arabs looked on and then had the nerve to load up and set sail straight out into the "mighty deep," the locals could have repeated what Nephi had pioneered. Arabs have been building nailed dhows ever since. [Lynn M. and Hope A. Hilton, Discovering Lehi, pp. 161-162]