Up the creek

I have to admit that the problem of the oars has weighed on my mind for some time: the closer the boat itself got to completion, the more I sank into gloom as my desire to do it properly collided with my lack of understanding of how to get there. As so often happens, actually getting stuck in relieved the pressure and, at the time of writing, we are well on the way to producing the oars.

Luckily, Joe stumbled upon this Canadian chap, who provides detailed guidance and a set of plans, which includes templates to limit our cockups to an acceptable margin. We hope.

If you are reading this because you want to build some oars, god help you... this isn't the place for detailed guidance, but our next few blogs will aim to give something of an overview which might help your planning, or avoidance of mistakes.

It's conceptually very simple: the oar is a long box made up of a base, sides and a cap. The sides are subtly tapered along the entire length towards each end, to give the correct shape, and the ends are filled to make a solid handle and spoon. Parallel sides are added to complete the spoon, or blade. The base and cap will then be shaped to give a rounded profile and the spoon cut, planed, sanded to give the traditional curved shape.

Here is our first pair waiting for the cap to be added:

The spoon end

The blocks in place to make the handles

It's important to get the sides as mirror images: small discrepancies  can be adjusted with a plane or sanding block, but getting it right from the outset is preferable, otherwise you may be swallowing a fly....

Note that the wood of the base and cap is very unlikely to be dead straight, so it's best to mark your own centre line and use that as a reference for shaping.

We then stuck the caps on and applied as much weight along the length as possible:

When the glue had set, we unclamped everything: there were some small gaps between the sides and the cap, which we concluded were due to the surfaces of the wood not being perfectly flat, but a bit of extra glue will take care of those.

We then planed off the excess where the cap and base overlapped the sides. After much checking to ensure that the handle end and the spoon were in alignment, we glued and clamped the laminates to widen the spoon. We have gone for a design which will give us a couple of mahogany stripes on the spoon: a sort of design twiddle to echo our breasthook and rudder yoke strips (see earlier blogs).

Oar laminates clamped

The spoon ready for shaping

You can discern the shape of the loom, which follows the lines determined by the sides of the oar.

Next comes the real challenge: shaping the spoons. One is easy enough, but four that match is tricky.