New Batch of Paddles for 2024

[Cruiser]

At camp last fall I decided I wanted to try a little longer shaft on my twin paddle ..... guess I must talk in my sleep because I had 3 requests that trip for paddles. I had also promised a friend from Louisiana I would try and make him a paddle to scull his boat in the bayou for fishing. So it was time to make some sawdust.

This is a group pic of the batch, minus one that a friend already received



Starting from the left, 932 grams, 1072 gram, 1087 grams , the missing one 953 grams and finally the sculling version 424 grams

All shafts have a 3/32" ash spine, the twins are 270 cm with carbon fiber ferrules and 1.25" round shafts ... all the twins are made from northern white cedar and western red cedar. All tipped in tinted epoxy with chopped glass strand re enforcement added.
This is a detail shot of the sculling blade, it is a scaled down and shortened Ottertail, with 2 plys of white oak on the lower 2 thirds of the outside edge to help with edge wear (and apparently fish conking)




Blade detail of my new twin



My highschool friends




Camp buddy #1



and camp buddy #2




Brian

 

[Boreal Birch]

Very nice, you have very lucky friends.

 

[Traveler]

Very very cool Brian - how did you make the checkerboard one? Are they individual squares epoxied together like a mosaic, or some fancy staining process?

 

[Cruiser]

Very very cool Brian - how did you make the checkerboard one? Are they individual squares epoxied together like a mosaic, or some fancy staining process?

Make up a pair of striped blanks



Make up some thin slats and slice the blanks and number the pieces



Flip every other piece and add the cross piece



Epoxy them all together, using tinted epoxy (dark cedar dust)



Cleanup the excess epoxy, to make the piece reasonably flat. Then setup whatever big saw you use to make a precise cut at the length wise joint. Take your time and get that right. All the original pieces were planed to be exactly the same, that means when you make this cut, you will just keep cutting all the length wise cuts.



Now glue the length wise slats in and get this ... cleanup and you have a completed blank





If anyone has questions, just ask ... I did the detailed post before, for the last batch, and don't want to keep making detailed posts about the same thing, I don't want to bore anyone.


Brian

 

[Gamma1214]

Never boring IMO. I tend to forget quickly unless I'm using the info often enough to retain it so more detail is welcomed if you're up to typing it every time. (I've gotta try a few paddles myself soon)

 

[Cruiser]

I did change a few things on this build, reduced the width of the ash spine from 1/8" to 3/32", to offset moving from 1 1/8" shaft diameters to 1 1/4".
A bonus of going to the larger shaft was that I could use my router and a new 5/8" radius bit to round the shafts



I stopped the rounding just short of the blade to give lots of room for carving the transitions




This worked really well and left a very small nib on 2 sides



Cleaning that up was very fast and easy ... pic of cleanup under way



I also changed the racking system used to hold the paddles at various stages of completion (epoxy, sanding, varnishing etc)





I will use this type again, was easy to make and easy to use.