Tag: oars

One last thing that I had to do, before varnishing the oars, was to install collars where the oars will sit in the oar locks. Such collars are traditionally made of leather; indeed, Jim Michalak calls them “leathers.”

He doesn’t use leather, though, for the leathers. Instead he uses synthetic masons twine. So, then, as do I. He varnishes the twine along with the wooden oars, except for leaving the handles bare. Again, then, so do I.

It’s a little harder than I’d planned, getting the slippery twine wrapped around the slippery shaft of the oil-stained loom. He says to secure the ends with knots, but the best way I find to begin the wrapping is to wrap the twine over itself, trapping itself tight underneath. This works just fine at the beginning of the wrap, but there’s no way I can do it at the end. On the first oar, I handily have a singed end just the right length to hitch around and bind where I want it to end. The second oar takes a little finagling but ends up ending the same way.

Then it’s time to varnish. The synthetic twine doesn’t soak up the varnish as well as I’d like, and the dark varnish turns the white twine a sickly baby poo brownish yellow. But, the first of a planned three coats is on and left to dry.

Did a little final tweaking on the shaping, then it was on to sanding.

Went over everything that I could with the quarter-sheet pad sander, with 100 grit and then with 150 grit.

Had to sand the handles by hand, though. That’s kinda poetic.

Oh, and I filled the remaining register holes from the glue up with wood fill.

They took such a long time to make, but they turned out so gorgeous.

So then I wiped on a little oil stain with the questionably orange cedar stain that I’d bought. Next week they’ll be ready to varnish.

Shaped the second oar, pretty much just like the first. Except that I learned maybe a thing or two from the first oar that I was able to do better on the second oar.

One was being a little more careful with the gadget in drawing the lines. The pencils have a tendency to drift toward each other if they’re not held rigidly when drawing the lines. Not a big deal, in that they’re just making layout lines and not actually cutting anything, but it just feels better to look at them when they’re straighter.

More important, though, was cutting the handle to square before shaping it round. I used the dozuki saw instead of the ryoba, and I made relief cuts into the waste area so that I could readjust to a straighter cut if I got off track. It was much better.

So now I’ve got both oars shaped. Next up is staining and varnishing.

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.

So, yeah, wow, the oars have turned out to be harder than I imagined. Who knew?

I knew that I could really benefit from using a hand plane or two for shaping at some point, so I trotted out my antique Stanley #4 smoother and block plain (and my not so antique Buck Brothers jack plane) to try my hand yet again at hand planes. I’ve never been successful with them.

Which is why they’ve been in storage for so long, and also because they suffered terribly in the flood we had in the basement. Oh, my, was there rust. A lot of rust.

And I felt terrible about that. Not that I was any good with these tools in the first place, but, at the very least, I should have been a better steward for the antique Stanley planes. Especially the #4 smoother. It’s a type 15, I’ve learned, made between 1931 & 1932. I feel like I should take better care of it.

So, more recently though, I watched Rex Krueger’s awesome video on restoring old Stanley bench planes. He showed some awesome results with a bench grinder and a wire wheel. And Dawn had just done the taxes and said I had a few dollars to spend on something for myself. So I bought myself the DeWalt DW756.

And it really, really did some good on my #4, getting rid of the heartbreaking rust. I was stunned. But then came trying to sharpen the iron itself. I tried the sandpaper method. I used my oil stones. I used my diamond stones. And I’m still terrible at sharpening.

But, I thought, maybe it’s sharp enough. Maybe I’m not getting a perfect flat mirror lapping the back of the iron, but maybe it’ll cut okay anyway. I’m not trying to get a shimmery surface on tiger maple or anything. I’m just trying to shape some pine.

So I tried using the plane on the taper on the loom on the oar where it goes from the 2″ square down to the 1-1/4″ where it meets the blade. And just a couple of strokes with the plane … and I broke it.

I broke my precious antique Stanley #4.

Now, I only broke the tote, the wooden rear handle, and not the precious cast iron or anything. It’s not the end of the world. But it’s pretty much the end of my career with hand planes.

I tried gluing the tote back together with wood glue, but the orientation of the grain makes it pretty much end grain that I’m trying to glue together. It didn’t work. So I used epoxy instead. That made an utterly ugly glue line, but it holds.

And I instead bought a power hand planer, the Porter Cable PC60THP, which is a malevolent looking beast but works, I suppose. And I used that this weekend to start shaping the oars to their final dimensions.

And it works really well on the square part of the loom, it works less well on the taper part of the loom, and it works surprisingly poorly on the blade. I really thought it would work super well on the blade.

So I’m back to using the rasp on the blade, which is a good workout. So far I’ve done one side of one blade. A couple more hours of that, though, and I should finish with the oars.

Oh, and I did get the boat turned right side up, ready for painting the inside yellow. I’ve ordered that paint.

Spent Saturday sizing and shaping oar pieces somewhat, and then glued them up on Sunday.

Each oar is made from three pieces which get glued together in a sandwich, as it were. Once glued, the middle of the sandwich doesn’t get shaped much top and bottom, except for the blade, which isn’t technically part of the sandwich anyway.

But the top and bottom parts of the sandwich, the top and bottom bun, say, while already cut side to side to taper from 2″ square down to 1-1/4″ round, are still 3/4″ thick for their full length. They each need to be 5/8″ thick at most and taper down to only 1/4″ thick at the point where the blade begins. The plans call for removing that extra stock after gluing together, but I’m shaping that some before gluing.

It’s stupid simple in a thickness planer to take a board 3/4″ thick and make it 5/8″ thick instead. And since I’ve got a planer, that’s what I do. I just make a little mark somewhere for 5/8″ thickness on each part and send them through the planer a few times until they’re down to the mark.

The taper from 5/8″ down to 1/4″, though, is a rather more tricky thing. I make some plans for a planer sled, where I would need to raise the bottom end of the bun up 3/8″ so as to plane it down to 1/4″. But I finally decide that a sled is more complicated than this operation needs to be, and besides I don’t think I can make any sort of wedge that’s 30″ long but only 3/8″ high to support the bun under the rollers in the planer. So that board is going to bend and not get planed right. Forget it.

I consider some sort of taper jig for the table saw, but that leaves a lot of material hanging off the front end of my tiny little table. I’m not comfortable with that, either.

I finally opt for using my little bench top jointer. I have an adjustable roller stand that I butt up against the infeed table, so that the incoming piece being jointed is lifted up … somewhat. Instead of measuring precisely how high above the table it is, I just sight along the jointer fence, trying to keep the line on the board level with the horizontal fluting along the fence.

This works, turns out. Works just fine, especially since I’m only aiming for getting close to the final line rather than exactly on it. I’m only removing most of the stock, not all of it. I’ll still be doing some final shaping after gluing the sandwiches together, with plane and/or rasp and/or file and/or sandpaper.

Gluing the sandwiches together is fairly straightforward, except that I worry about the parts sliding around with the slippery glue while I’m trying to clamp it all together. Jim Michalak suggests tapping in a “light temporary nail to keep the pieces from sliding around on each other because almost all glues are quite slippery until they start to set.” Ain’t it the truth.

I tap in two light temporary nails, 1-1/4″ long 3d nails to be exact, spaced toward each end of the square part of the loom, on each side of the sandwich. I drill 5/64″ pilot holes, thinking that I’ll have to tap in the nails, since Googling for the diameter of a 3d nail and finding 0.083″ as the answer, whereas 5/64″ is 0.078125″ so I’ll have a smaller hole than the nail. But the nails pretty much slide in and out of the pilot holes without tapping. Either I read the wrong row or, heck, the wrong website, or else that 0.083″ is just a nominal size and nails ain’t exactly precision tools, or maybe my 5/64″ drill bit is a smidge bigger, or maybe I accidentally used the 3/32″ drill bit.

Whatever. These nails are only for temporary alignment, so they don’t need to stay in past the clamping stage. They work just fine.

I expected to use all my clamps, but I don’t. I use most of them, though.

Dawn thinks I’m nuts, but I’m making my own set of oars. Specifically, I’m building what I call Michalak Oars. (Jim Michalak acknowledges that he based his design on Pete Culler’s oars, so Gavin Atkin calls them Culler-Michalak oars.)

One factor is cost, where I’m splurging on 1 × 8 pine at $22 per board but even the cheapest oars on Amazon or at like Cabela’s are twice that, but furthermore my oars are hopefully going to be better than those more expensive oars. As Atkin says:

The Culler-Michalak method produces a pair of oars at a fraction of the price you will be charged for a single badly balanced and clunky ready-made oar bought from a yacht chandler. So these real paragons among oars are cheap as well as right for the purpose.

Atkin, G. (2008). Ultrasimple boatbuilding: 17 plywood boats anyone can build. Camden, Me.: International Marine/McGraw-Hill.

So I’m definitely going with the great Jim Michalak on the matter.

I am making one small change, though, in that I’m using 1 × 8 lumber instead of 1 × 6. I never could make the 1 × 6 size work for the parts in SketchUp. Atkin and Michalak both say it works, but I’m using 1 × 8 anyway, despite it being like $5 more per board. I’m spending $10 in insurance, I guess.

The President’s Day holiday weekend was great, having the three days, where I bought the boards and got them home on Saturday, got all the parts marked on the boards on Sunday, and cut out all the parts on Monday.

My local Home Depot only had 4 eight-foot 1 × 8 boards from which to choose my 2, so I got the straightest 2 of the bunch as best I could. I had to wait almost a half hour to even get into the aisle where the boards were stacked, as it was blocked off for … whatever. Maybe carting in more stock or something. I was over buying some rope while I was waiting, which itself took the longest time to get somebody to cut it with the hot knife for me. Sigh.

But anyway I got the pine home and marked it up. It was quite a fun project, as it was in the relatively roomy (and warm) basement instead of the cramped (and nowadays cold) garage. Dawn was off seeing the Maryland gymnastics team meet Rutgers, so I even had Pandora blasting some tunes. (I don’t usually listen to music while working, at least not while I’m using any tool of any kind. But I figure I can hardly get that injured if I’m distracted while wielding a pencil.)

I measured and re-measured and checked my measurements over and over, patiently erasing plenty of errant lines as I plotted out the parts. The worst was when I drew the lower part of the loom an extra 1/8 inch, where I have no idea how I got that wrong, since it’s a plain 30″ length (although a taper from 2″ down to 1-1/4″). But pencil mistakes are not nearly as upsetting as saw mistakes.

Cutting out all the parts was rather much more challenging. First was that I used a jig saw, where Michalak uses, and recommends, a band saw. He laments that not everyone has a band saw, but he uses one anyway. But, yeah, I don’t have a band saw. Even if I did, though, I guess I’d only have like a 9″ or 10″ bench top band saw, which I’m not sure about maneuvering an eight-foot board around on one of those.

He also says that some folks use a table saw instead, which I do have one of those. But I don’t really see how that would work. Maybe by separating the parts first with a jig saw and then using the table saw to cut out the parts proper? But that’s a lot of long angled cuts, which I can only imagine needs some sort of taper jig on the table saw, since you couldn’t use an angled miter gauge. No thanks.

So the jig saw wasn’t great, but it was what I could use. The biggest problem was holding the work on my work bench while cutting. That involved a lot of clamping on the edge of the bench, making all or maybe even just part of a cut, and then un-clamping and moving and re-clamping the piece.

There was a lot of strategery involved. But it all got cut out.

Next steps are supposed to be gluing the 3-piece sandwiches together and then shaping the oars with plane and rasp and file. I’ve got some alternative ideas to help speed that along. Maybe. We’ll see.