Carving a 6' oar

[wood2woodknot]

Just finished an interesting personal challenge – carving a 6’ oar with basically hand tools only. Daughter wanted an oar to hang over her mantle but could not find any old, used ones and new ones were too pricey, so dad took on the challenge for her birthday. The only power tools used were a band saw and table saw to rough out a blank from 2x8 red cedar. Entire shaping process was done by hand with planes (a block and a #4),  a chisel, and a small rasp. By the time it was finished there were two large kitchen trash liners of shavings. Final dimensions were 1.25” diameter for the grip and 1.5” for the shaft. Blade tapered from 1.5” down to 3/8” for the edges. Making the 5” shaft round and straight, and then evenly tapering the blade was a good hand/eye skill builder. Final dimensions matched those of a store model. Four coats of Arm-R-Seal finished the job. If I had to make more of these, I would change the approach, but doing it the hard way was well worth the learning experience.

[museumguy]

Very cool. I hope she loves it (I'm sure she did). Great work.

[Downwindtracker2]

Drawknife then a spokeshave.

[wood2woodknot]

Would have been a lot quicker, but first things first ... just working with what I had. Actually, the chisel was a big help with the shaft and the grip. Resting the back on the shaft gave me a thin cut with almost no tearout while acting like a jointer plane to keep the line straight as I shaved off the excess stock.

[cbygeorge]

A labor of love I am sure!  What a wonderful gift.

[cputnam]

Wow!. Good work there dude. Love projects done for the kids.