Although this blade was protected by a strip of hardwood that was glued in place and covered with fiberglass, the wear and tear of cruising still took its toll. This is one of a pair of oars that I built and equipped with copper tips in 1985. That winter, they survived my 2,400-mile, 2-1/2 month sneakbox row from Pittsburgh to Cedar Key, Florida. They've been in use on and off since then.
Dale McKinnon
Photographs by the author
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Very effective technique–as well as simple and elegant. Thanks for sharing this.
Great article. Very well illustrated and easy to follow. Thanks for sharing this effective tip on protecting oars.
I like the solution adapted for oars with the rounded blade with copper cover.
When I build the oars to be used in shallow water, I sometimes add a piece of black locust-type hardwood to the blade tip.
The timing of the article couldn’t be better. I have been drying two planks of ash in my workshop to make canoe paddles and was just starting to think about how to fasten copper sheet to the rounded the bottoms. I had not seen your copper design and think it will be perfect!
I have built my own kayak paddles for a number of years, gradually evolving my design and methods, starting from a David Zimmerly article on Aleut and Inuit paddles in a Sea Kayaker magazine of long ago. He called this one a Mackenzie River model. The design has willow-leaf shaped blades. I use Sitka spruce for the shaft, and build up blades from red cedar. The shafts are hollow, with a wall thickness of about 3/16″. The blades are moderately spooned and have a slight ridge lengthwise down the face of the blade, on the theory that it helps prevent fluttering (which does seem to work). The backs are convexly curved. In a sculling stroke, the blades exhibit remarkable laminar flow and provide strong support.
Originally I fiberglassed the blade tips, but this quickly wore off with use. On the last one I built (which I am still using) I tried a different method. I mixed up a pot of epoxy using a slow-cure resin, and stood the paddle upright with about 3 to 4 inches of the blade immersed. After the epoxy cured, I ground and sanded the excess epoxy off to restore the desired blade shape and thickness (thickness at the tips being about 1/4″).
So far, this paddle has held up very well to all the usually abuse—fending off docks, rocks, and the bottom. I don’t baby the paddle at all. Being a wobbly old guy, I depend on the paddle as a support pole as I clamber out of the boat and stagger my way up the beach.
I believe that a well-suited epoxy for this application would be “Git Rot,” which is formulated to penetrate the wood, giving it the “toughness of a screw driver handle” (to paraphrase the manufacturer’s claims).
(Fun Story: I was paddling with George Gronseth years ago with one of my earlier home-built paddles. George was using a custom-built paddle with unfeathered, rather wide flat blades. He suggested we swap paddles for comparison. I complained-by way of a preemptive apology-that my paddle had an annoying flutter. He said “What’s wrong with a little flutter?” And it turned out that his paddle also had an annoying flutter.)
P. S I should have mentioned that George Gronseth is proprietor of Seattle Kayak Academy, in Issaquah, WA.