: people use laminations, switch the grain up to avoid warp. is this warp
: part of "the deal" with traditional paddles?
Brett,
Lots of good advice here, but at the end of the day you're probably going to have better luck laminating up your blank from a couple of 1 X 6"s. Whether your problem is due to moisture or reaction of the wood to internal stresses you have relieved, the plain fact is that the lumber available today is of low quality. I recently bought a hundred "select" 2 x 4s (@$2/stick) which were carefully picked over by the yardman who helped me load them. These pieces had very narrow grain, meaning they were not plantation trees. Yet many had waney or barky edges which indicated they came from very small bolts, perhaps 8-10" in diameter. In the past most loggers wouldn't even bother with softwood bolts this size. Now there's apparently a market for them. With a little twisting and blocking these worked fine for finishing the basement where they're major task will be holding up sheet rock. For building boats I think we're stuck with "engineered" lumber either as laminated wood, plywood or resin-strip-glass composites.

Because the grain of a log tends to follow the taper of the log, milling a bolt with a saw usually cuts across the grain. Very few sawyers are going to set up a bolt to mill with the grain rather than parallel with the pith because of the extra handling and "waste" involved. So even if a decent log is found you're unlikely to find grain that doesn't run out of the milled board. I've got poplar, walnut, cherry, maple, ash and red oak logs waiting to be milled in the yard once the snow and mud are gone. I'd be happy to custom mill you an edge grain blank from any of them. Now, if I could only email it.

Even the native builders had a better lumber supply than we do. The trees that washed up on their shores were from old growth forests. To use these logs they would split the logs which tend to tear along the grain boundries resulting in straight grained blanks.