De Pan

Cherry Edged Beothuk Part 2

Another paddle awaiting some attention was my attempt at a cherry edged, birch-cherry laminated paddle based on a surmised Beothuk design documented in Adney's sketches. Unfortunately the sharp recuve at the tip was too much for the cherry striped edging and the glue did not hold when the clamps were removed. The rest of the blade was fine so in order to salvage this paddle, I redrew the tip a bit higher and re-cut the blade with this ultimately, more narrow tip. A while back, I had set up the shaving horse outdoors and did some work in the brisk spring sunshine.


Split Edging; Redrawn blade


Working on the shaving horse
Adney documented the surmised grip on this paddle as a spherical bobble and this would be my first attempt at something like this. Given the cherry edging, I thought it appropriate to laminate some extra cherry pieces onto the grip which could then be eventually shaped into a sphere. The approximate grip size sketched on the birch (with internal sketches of an octagon) was cut when originally shaping the blank. Additional blocks of scrap cherry were cut to size and then sawn to remove the angled edges resulting in an octagon effect when glued up. The plan is to further shape it with a rasp down to a bobble shape confortable in the hands. Here are some images.


The initial square grip with sketching; Cherry pieces, Glued up
I still haven't worked on the paddle shaft yet as there is more fine tuning to do on the blade region, but here is the work in progress so far...



Sept 1/09 Update: Part 3 has now been posted.