Spines and handles

I am discovering that Joe is spooked by things that work off electricity. He is very wary of the bench saw (I am rather with him on this, because it is a scary beast). But he also believes that orbital sanders are the work of the devil and the router a thing with a malevolent mind of its own. Witchcraft is behind these machines...

"Someone's using a Black and Decker Orbital round here"

We now have all four oars at different stages of completion. The first one has been the guinea pig and has taken about 10 hours to get close to the final shape, but we are confident that what we have learnt along the way will mean that the others are much quicker to produce. The others are following behind nicely.

The trick is to wait until Joe goes off to send smoke signals to people, then get to work with the power tools.

The router helped, so did a sanding disc attached to an angle grinder, as I mentioned before. A lot of wood had to be removed to get from this:

to this:

Nearly there: not bad for a first try? Instruments of the devil in the background.

A big challenge was shaping the central ridge or spine that appears to splice into the spoon from the loom. The answer was much patience and many iterations. Compared to that, the handle is quite straightforward:

Shaping the handle, using a milk bottle top as a template

There is still a huge amount of shaping, sanding and planing, but we can see that the results will be worth it.