Making a Greenland Paddle

Until I can get all the materials together to build the kayak, or at least enough to start on the gunwales, I figured I'd have a go at making a couple of Greenland paddles. I managed to find a half decent piece of pine at a local timber merchant that was big enough to make two paddles*. I made mine last week, but never thought of taking photographs of the process till I was half way through, they don't take long to make.

Below is the finished product prior to being oiled. The blank piece of pine next to it will become Donna's paddle, and the subject of the next few entries in this blog; including this one.



There is a mine of information online for making kayaks, but everyone that writes about making Greenland paddles seems to use Chuck Holst's instructions. I'm the same, but I also downloaded Matt Johnson's video on the subject. Matt also used Chuck's instructions in his video, so it's well worth watching a couple of times before you start.

The timber I got was originally 2.4m long 190mm wide and 35mm thick. I got them to rip it down the middle for me as I figured they'd do a better job than I could with my handheld circular saw. The two pieces cost me just over $25 for the lot.

As you can see from the picture below, there's a very slight curve in the wood, so it wasn't just a case of finding the middle of each end and measuring from there. I had to mark out the middle of the middle - if that makes any sense - then draw a straight line out to the ends. It basically means I just have to plane more off one side than the other to get rid of the curve. There was also a very slight twist in the wood as well, which caused a lot of head scratching and erasing of lines, until I got out a string line to make sure I'd measured correctly.

You know the old saying, measure twice, cut once.



You can see in the next picture the offset. On a straight piece of wood those two lines would be either side of the middle of that end. Once the waste is removed the curve won't be noticeable, in fact it won't even be there.



The next picture shows where I've marked the centre of the soon-to-be paddle and the ends of the loom, or handle. For this paddle the loom is 50cm long, just under 20".



When I made the first paddle last week, I then went on the same day to plane down to where I'd marked, then I marked out the shape of the paddle on each face and started cutting with a jigsaw. All I did today was cut the timber to length, 210cm, and marked it out ready for planing. I had to feed the animals and get ready for work after that. The plane is a bit too noisy for me to use once I get home from work, so I couldn't work on it tonight. If the weather's fine tomorrow I hope to try out the first paddle, then I'll get stuck into the planing when I get home. That'll be the topic of my next entry.


*I mean the pine was big enough for two paddles, not the timber merchant.