Oars

Started on some oars to keep my mind off the frames. The oars come in Jim Michalak’s book Boatbuilding for Beginners and Beyond, it’s becoming a well thumbed tome. For a while I thought I’d go for Dynamite Payson’s oars but eventually the Michalak ones proved to have more detail in terms of marking out the wood and more explanation for the building. Also they’re laminated whereas the Payson oars come from one piece and maybe more likely to warp.

It made a welcome break to do something straight forward and with plenty of explanation. The light Trow plans are packed with detail as I found out again later on but you really have to dig and delve to get to it. I’ve got the plans on the computer and I open them using Freehand 9 which is an old version. I can’t read the measurements straight off the screen but have to write down the co-ordinates of each point and then subtract one co-ordinate from another to get a length. This works, but it is time consuming and jotting down the x and y then subtracting adds room for error.

Later I came back to the frame plans to take the dimensions for frame 3, but then I decided to look at the bird’s eye view drawings of the boat. Expanding the plans to 200% on a whim I saw that provision has been made for ply backing on the frames. Albeit 5mm ply which I haven’t got.