Working Saturday and Sunday, as well as on Monday night, I finished shaping one of the two oars.
I used the electric planer to remove as much stock on the second side of the blade as I could before finishing with the rasp. I tried a few different methods with the planer, trying to say exactly on one side of the blade, using the fence that came with the planer as well as attempting to use a metal ruler as a fence. Neither worked very well; in fact, I cut some of the ruler as it was way too thin to be an effective fence. Luckily it’s aluminum, I think, and didn’t damage the planer knives.
I made a little gadget that Jim Michalak suggests using to mark out the layout lines when turning the 4-sided looms into 8 sides, on their way to being round. I thought I had measured the holes well enough to hold the pencils and the dowels that I’m using as little fences, but the holes turned out to be a bit big. So I shimmed them as best I could by wrapping paper around the dowels and pencils. It worked, meh, just okay. If I were building oars for a living I’d make a better version, maybe epoxy for the dowels and little wedges for the pencils.
Jim Michalak says that he leaves his looms (and handles) 8-sided, rather than shaping them any further. I had originally planned to do the same. But at some point I started rasping the corners of the eight sides a bit, just to soften them, and then I kept going and ending up fully rounding them. And they turned out so utterly wonderfully beyond anything I could have expected. They really look great.
But fully rounding the looms did then present me with the problem of how to transition between the square and round parts of the loom. I arbitrarily picked a spot 4 inches down the loom from the end of the square part and from there pretty much split the difference between the points of the octagonal shaping and the points of the squares. That also turned out so much better than I could have imagined.
There’s something of a transition between the bottom of the loom and the top of the blade, and there I used a chisel to pare away the loom stock. That worked out really well, making it a lovely transition.
For the handle, I first had to trim the 1″ wide by 2-1/4″ tall handle area to a 1″ square, creating two more shoulders between the handle and the square loom. I used the rip teeth of the double-sided ryoba saw along the 5″ length, and I didn’t cut nearly as straight as I would have wished. So the handle at the shoulder is maybe a little thin. It’s not so bad that bad, though. Maybe you can’t see it. But I sure can see it.
Then I shaped the handle to eight sides and then round, except that I more eyeballed the lines to mark the eight sides rather than use the gadget. And I had to do rather quite a bit of chiseling at the shoulders of the square loom, but they do look a lot better now for it.
So, now, after a month, I’ve got one good oar.
Lesson 1: Vise and Weights
I used quite a bit of elbow grease on these oars when using the rasp. I keep trying to maintain a lighter touch, make the rasp do the work, not force it. But I get going sometimes.
And the oar clamped in the little vise on the bench starts to move the bench a bit. Or a lot. So some weight on the bottom shelf of the bench would help quite a bit. I’ve got a bag of winter ice melt out in the garage that I should have brought in and put down on that shelf. Maybe even 2 bags.
And I’ve been thinking maybe a Moxon vise on the bench would work a bit better than the simple bench vise I’ve got. I could move a Moxon vise anywhere on the bench I need, rather than the bench vise fixed in place. And the Moxon vise would work better on the taper on the oars. That’s be so nice.