building wooden oars for a sailing dinghy 8

The oars have been painted - three undercoats and two top coats - that should do.

Now, they have to be positioned in the rowlocks and this position marked off ready for locating the protective leathers.

Just enough to do both oars

Can you smell that leather - wonderful........

I'll leave it a few more days for the paint to thoroughly dry before doing this last job. I should have just enough leather to do the protective sleeves and some strips left over to build up some protective strip button stops - my technical name for them - basically the rim of those black plastic oar collars you can get.

Final verdict? They will pass the 'look great from 20 feet away' test. Rustic rather than professional. A good bit of carpentry learning...which to be honest.....I won't be repeating in a hurry again!

My oar making journey

Bought CLC  plans

Drew out the templates

Cut some thin ply templates

Glued up three pieces of douglas fir

bought some new tools.....well.......to show respect to the wood you know.......

hand cut out the two oars because the band saw couldn't do it....and three days later 

....started shaping the oars and creating piles of fantastically smelling shavings

and the planing and spoke shaving continued...........

....until eventually oar shapes emerged and I was at risk of making them too light and too thin......

three undercoats later

and two final top coats........

Voila! A pair of rustic looking oars - in perfect keeping with the state of poor old Arwen