How to Build Your Own Paddle

Understanding how paddles are built and why they are built a certain way can greatly help with a deeper understanding of stroke efficiency. Building your own paddle will give you a greater appreciation and respect for paddles.

Not everyone is capable or interested in woodworking, but I will leave that part to you. I learned by building my own that any paddle should always be treated with respect for the craftsmanship that created it and it should never be used as a tool for anything other than paddling. The following article describes making wooden paddles in a makeshift wood shop that was formerly called a garage.

This article details how to build your own double bend outrigger canoe paddle. When complete, this paddle weighed 17 ounces (1 to 2 ounces heavier than a Kialoa carbon fiber hybrid paddle. This article was originally published in April 2009 at http://learning.vivaa.ca

What You Need

If you wish to build a paddle you must have, or have access to:

• A respectable wood plane,
• Wood clamps,
• Good hand saw,
• Saw to cut curves out shape of paddle blade (coping saw, jig saw),
• Sandpaper,
• Waterproof wood glue,
• Varnish and brushes,
• Patience,
• Tape measure,
• Wood drill and bits for T handle

Things that make it easier

• Wax paper (for glue up and glue control),
• Table saw (to more easily dimension lumber and paddle parts),
• Dimension planer (most lumber other than studs for a house comes 'rough',
• Router with pattern bit (to cut out shape of blade paddle),
• Work bench,
• Spoke shave(s) (for dressing the shaft to size),
• Drill press and Forstner drill bits (to drill into the handle to fit the shaft),
• Power Sander

The first thing you will need to build your paddle is a design and an idea of what type of paddle you want to make. The first paddle I made was a decorative traditional paddle used by the voyager paddlers to steer big canoes. It was never intended to actually paddle or steer a canoe, but served to teach me the basics of construction and left me with a rather large conversation piece.

Paddle Design

The design of a paddle is the most critical step in building a paddle. It must be light, must catch the water easily at the front of the stroke, must be strong and should have a particular amount of flex or whip depending on your personal paddling style and preferences. The best place to research paddle design is by closely examining existing paddle designs of various manufacturers and ask yourself "Why did they do this. or that?". For your first paddle, I would not reinvent the wheel until you know how your first design works. Stick to a standard paddle shaft angle of 10 degrees, standard blade shape and width of 9 to 9 1/2" and a shaft length suitable to what you would normally use for paddling. I usually use a 53" paddle and ended up with my first paddle being 50" in length because I incorrectly guestimated. "You can always cut some off, but cannot add to the length".

The paddle handle can be made in a curve to relieve the pressure in the top part of the hand by up to 5 degrees of forward arc (double bend) OR it can be made as a straight shaft (single bend). In many commercially made paddles, a laminated shaft is used to allow for a more flexible strong shaft with less weight and bulk.

Laying out the basic outline shape of the paddle parts on a sheet of plywood is a great way to ensure the parts are fit properly together, the angles are correct and the parts are correctly in plane. In the adjacent photograph the basic layout pattern is shown on a piece of plywood.

• A is the curve outline;
• B is the effective shaft alignment (from the blade attachment to the handle attachment)
• C denotes the shaft-blade assembly angle layout of 9 or 10 degrees
• D is the blade attach plane.
• A straight shaft can be made with a soft core of one piece of red cedar, other other softer wood, and a relatively hard strip of yellow cedar, or other harder wood on opposing sides of the shaft. The sandwich arrangement provides stability and structural rigidity providing a very strong and light weight shaft. Dimensions of a paddle should be thoroughly investigated and planned out prior to commencing construction.

Choice of wood

Local woods with strong spiritual significance to the local native culture of British Columbia were used in the paddle construction. In attempting to find Koa wood to build a traditional Hawaiian paddle, I found there is an equally strong paddle culture in local native culture of my own province. An old native proverb states, "You might as well ride a horse in the direction its going".

Things for you to consider in selection of wood are:

• Strength
• flexibility
• low weight
• colour (if you are making a paddle by hand, make it pretty)

I used laminated strips of yellow and red cedar for the shaft with Canadian 'Eastern Hard" Maple for the tip and side strips of the blade with a red cedar blade core. The maple provides wear resistance and strength to the paddle blade. The red cedar provides stability, strength and very low weight. It also resists rot.

My paddle all in weighs 17 ounces, one ounce or so more than a Kialoa Axel 2 paddle. Every ounce is a major consideration when you consider 60 strokes a minute for a one hour race makes 3600 strokes. The math reveals lifting an extra 225 pounds per hour of paddling for EACH extra ounce in your paddle.

Construction

For a laminated curved shaft, lay out the outline of the curve on a 2x4 or 2x6 piece of lumber and cut out the arc with a jig saw to create a male and female mold for your lamination. From three to eight narrow strips of wood approximately 1/8" thick should be used on a curved shaft The more glue joints,the stiffer the shaft. They should be glued up 2 or 3 at a time and firmly clamped in the mold until the glue is set. Once all the strips are laminated the shaft can be removed from the mold and it should firmly hold its shape. The two outside protective laminations for the shaft optionally may be left until the final paddle assembly is complete. They canl be glued down over the face of the paddle to provide integrity between the blade and the shaft.

Once the basic lamination is removed from the glue-up, it can be planed to remove glue squeeze out.