: I have decided to try my hand at building a euro paddle. I am going
: to combine the instructions from Dwayne strokaker (spelling),
: building a carbon blade euro paddle and Kurt's building a birds
: mouth canoe paddle together. Should be interesting. On dwaynes
: site he says his paddle weighs about 32 oz and kurt says his 50
: inch canoe paddle weighs 13.5 oz. my paddle is going to be 215
: cm or 85 inches, so I am already wondering what the result will
: be.

: Today I cut the staves for the paddle and birds mouthed them, i
: decided to do the egg shape by using two three quarter pieces
: and six half inch pieces. setting up the fence for the birds
: mouth wasn't all that hard, but glueing the damned things
: together to made a egg shaped circle was another story. Thank
: god for an extra set of hands.
: So far so good, I will update as I go.

: Dave g

I made a birds mouth paddle last fall. I inserted an octagonal shaped plug in each end much as Bob Beaullieu suggests he plans to try in his reply except I made mine 14 inches long. That allowed me to attach roughly shaped blades to each side of the shaft and then do the final shaping with the center of the blades being the 'filled in' part of the shaft (essentially following the directions in Nick's book). This worked reasonably well although the plugs were not tightly fitted along the whole length of the blade so I had to fill in some cracks with wood flour-thickened epoxy. I always planned on reinforcing the blades with fiberglass anyway, so filling in the cracks really wasn't an issue.

I have small hands and made the mistake of using strips that were too wide for the shaft. By the time I shaped the shaft down to a comfortable diameter, the wood was too thin in places and I thought the shaft would be too fragile so I reinforced it with fiberglass. Even with addition of the glass and epoxy, the paddle just weighs 22 oz.

Now that I've finished my Guillemot, I'll need a rainy day project so I'm planning to make another, starting with narrower, but thicker, strips so I shouldn't need to use as much glass.

Dwight