material for paddle shaft?

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sluggo
Posts: 244
Joined: Tue Sep 12, 2006 11:17 pm
Location: Vancouver BC

material for paddle shaft?

Post by sluggo »

I was thinking about mixing laminates of walnut and wrc for a canoe paddle. The color contrast would be nice and the wrc would help keep the weight down a bit. However, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to mix hard and soft woods for shaping and abuse because of non-uniform wear. Is this likely to be a problem?

thanks
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Gunnelman
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Joined: Thu Apr 19, 2007 5:59 pm
Location: B.C West Coast, Canada

Re: material for paddle shaft?

Post by Gunnelman »

sluggo wrote:I was thinking about mixing laminates of walnut and wrc for a canoe paddle. The color contrast would be nice and the wrc would help keep the weight down a bit. However, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to mix hard and soft woods for shaping and abuse because of non-uniform wear. Is this likely to be a problem?

thanks
Hey sluggo, im a finishing carpenter & have worked with both hard & soft woods. And i would think the wear factor with mixing hardwood & soft together could later become a prob. And with that said it really depends on what the project was being used for. If it was something that was in a house on a mantel, it would be fine to mix hard & soft woods. But being a paddle, in & out of water, sun light, UV rays, etc could break the woods down in differant ways, makeing the paddles unstable.
Ive never made paddles, but its just my knowledge of the woods that bring me to that outcome. Cheers.
If only we could all Paddle to our Work !
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pawistik
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Location: Saskatoon, SK

Post by pawistik »

What you are proposing seems to be not uncommon in making paddles. The harder wood (walnut in your example) is placed on the outside of the shaft, while the softer wood (cedar) is used on the inner portion. This arrangement can give the best of both worlds - creating a shaft that resists dings & has some strength, yet is not overly heavy. The orientation of the grain might be a larger factor than simply hard vs soft wood. To comment further I'll have to go to the garage (where I've been referring to it while making a paddle for my daughter) and get my copy of Warren & Gidmark's Canoe Paddles, A Complete Guide to Making Your Own.....

On page 60 of the aforementioned book it says of creating laminated paddles:
You will be able to amalgamate different woods and diverse grain directions to combine their desirable properties.
Here is an important consideration which addresses what I referred to above. The book says that the problem of grain orientation or different woods being a potential problem is due to differential expansion when the woods get wet. So, ensure that the wood can't soak up any water, and you should be safe.

Cheers,
Bryan[/quote]
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Bryan Hansel
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Post by Bryan Hansel »

You'll have no problems. I do it for all my paddles. I use softwood outsides with a 1/4" strip down the center of hardwood. I usually use cedar and ash, but walnut will look great.

My paddles see heavy use and I beat them with no issues. My cedar/ash Greenland paddle has over 800-900 miles on it and if I sanded the thing, it would look as good as new.

Here an article I post on my blog about building a laminated twisted shaft paddle: http://www.nessmuking.com/twist.htm This is a relatively new paddle, built last fall, but I've been using it on every paddle I take. It has the perfect stiffness and it very light for wood. It comes in a 32 ounces, and could be much lighter.

Right now, I'm working on a cedar/ash paddle with a foam core. The cedar is hollowed out and filled with foam, and two 1/4" by 5/16" strips of ash are glued with PU glue to a piece of foam. This will all be twisted like my twisted shaft mentioned above, but with a better jig that I'm in the process of building. I hope this paddle will weigh in the mid 20 ounces.
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