I have been thinking
about getting a canoe this year instead of renting. It would be nice to have something nicer and
lighter than the beat up piece of crap that you get if you rent, not to mention
have a boat that you know how it handles and are familiar with, and also the
convenience of having it and using it whenever you want. But, I also need some paddles for the
canoe. A friend of mine told me about a
paddle maker nearby Guelph that hold make your own paddle workshops that sounds
like something I’d like to do a lot, since I like woodworking and making my own
things.
The workshop was organized through a
group at the Evergreen Ranch,
an interesting ranch and meeting space
for the collective that meets there for music and other things such as this
workshop. The paddle maker is Bruce Smith who makes paddles and
also conducts these popular paddle making workshops in the area. Normally the paddlemaking is conducted in one
8 hour session but this one is broken up into two sessions two weeks apart to
be much fresher for the second part. Bruce
prepares the blanks for the paddles, planes and removes a good bulk of the
material, so you are only doing the important shaping of the wood, not
tediously removing the bulk. I chose a Tripper paddle with a shaft length
of 34”. The wood is a black cherry for
the workshop and is made out of a single piece of 1.125” thick wood.
Bruce is a great
teacher and it’s evident he has been doing this for a long time. Even though it does take a little bit of
physical activity to shave the wood, it is quite easy (at least for me) to do,
and is much easier that I would think it would be.
The first step to
making a paddle after the blank is to mark the centerline and edges that you
want to shave down to. You want to shave
the edges down to 5mm, and the Bruce’s method/design for the tip is to thicken
it to 10mm at the very end to give it some durability for using the paddle to
push off, or when you hit shallow bottom.
Some other paddle makers wrap the end in fiberglass or use inserts for
this purpose as well.
Then you use a spokeshave to start removing material by beveling the edges from the middle to the thickness you
marked on the sides. The lower part of
the paddle is then flattened so there is no ridge in the middle and the paddle
is relatively thin before the tip, to allow some blade flex. The wood, depending on the grain, knots, and
other variables such as sap wood or heart wood, grain directions, etc, gives
the wood a carving character, and it needs to be worked differently in
different areas. Sometimes pushing the spokeshave is
better than pulling, or pulling at a diagonal is better than pulling along the
blade to minimize chatter. It is very
much a feel thing than a straightforward just do it thing.
Next comes the shaft, having to make an oval
shape The worry when doing this kind of work is
that you will mess something up and take too much wood off. As everyone always says, you can always take
more off later, but you can’t put it back on.
The method for rounding the shaft is shave corners at 45 degrees, then
give a stoke on either side at 22.5 degreest to make a polygon. Do this for all four corners, then keep
repeating until it feels like it should with your hand. Then use the rasp to clean up any ridges and
make the surface more uniform.out of a rectangular cross section, and it is surpridsingly easier than I thought, with just a spokeshave and a flat rasp..
Making my own paddle will be quite satisfying
and is a fun thing to do to have a paddle for my canoe. Next session in two weeks will be to finish the handle
and transition form shaft to blade, rough sand then finish sand the paddle,
then I bring it home to stain, possibly wood burn, and finish oil/varnish. More photos and logging then!
The Portageur’s blog
has an excellent descriptive writeupand photos of the steps to make a paddle
when he did it in a Bruce Smith workshop several years ago, check it out as
well.
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