Day Eight

Date: 5/17/22

Current Time: 7:39

Today’s Time: 6:30 hrs

Overall Time: 48:50 hrs

Today was a weird day. I feel like I didn’t get much done but it’s just that the things I was doing took a lot of time because it was mostly by hand. This is also the point where my plans are a bit lackluster. All of the things I have found online always brush over how to make the handle of the oar (not to be confused with the shaft) and that was one of the things I needed to work on today. But first, I did a bit more work on the blade of the oar, just to get them a bit more symmetrical. Next, though, I rounded over the angles that I cut my handle to!

It was actually surprisingly easy once I got the hang of it! I used a hand plane (not electric this time) to break the edges and then sanded everything to a round with 120 grit on the orbital. 

Now that I had the shaft mostly done, I only had one more thing to do, the handle. If I were to do it again I would have put more thought into how I went about it. Greg suggested that I use the table router and just rotate it while it was touching the blade to get an idea of how deep I would need to go. The problem was, that the paddles have curved a bit since I processed them so the cut was of uneven depth. Eventually, I used a dado to get a similar effect with less error. The next issue was with the tool I started out with to get the whole handle down to thickness. I started off with a spokeshave (a type of hand plane) but it was ripping up the grain of the wood. In the end, I just used an electric grinder to make the handle.