Making wooden oars?

Hope I'm in the right place with this question.
Have any of you made your own wooden oars.
I have a small 12' skiff and need oars just a bit longer, but Money is a problem for me.
Maybe some of you have noticed all the expenses have risen way above your retirement income (and I'm too old to go back to work)

So I"m questioning whether it would be cheaper to build wooden oars?

What kind of wood?
I have plenty of Oak. Would something else be better?

Is there a text on this subject somewhere within this site?

 

Ash or spruce are preferred up here in Maine, and I'd recommend spruce for strength to weight. Ash tends to be a bit heavier, but very durable.
I've made canoe paddles but oars (which are one of this winter's projects) are very easy to make with a little knowhow.
A pair of very straight-grained 2x6s chosen from a pile at the lumber yard will set you back only a few dollars. They will limit you to 1 1/2" and you may want more girth on longer oars, so you might try seeking a thicker stock by buying the wood in the rough.
Plans shouldn't be hard to find/. Old Woodenboat magazines are a good place to start. In any case, you can imagine the profile is cut first, initially getting a square-sectioned shaft that stops just short of the blade. The jigsaw takes over to profile the blade.
A power plane can make short work of the blade shaping, though a taqble saw can also get the job done (I would use a table saw).
Take a good look at a fine oar. You might use a borrowed one to copy.
Even crude oars are really expensive, and fine oars can be prohibitively so.
Making your own shouldn't be more than a day's work. Leathering will take even more time, but if you're handy, it's not hard to do. You don't have to stitch the leather. You can tack it with copper tacks available at any hardware store. I've leathered a few and they held up fine for years.
Lastly, varnish them well with a good six coats and another every season.

Alan

 

i have 12 foot dory, oars are 2100
do the conversion,
take a piece 50mm square(2 inch) round off to 1420 from inboard end then flatten both sides like this, to a taper
clue the sides on the blade

 

I did find two different plan sets for wooden oars.

Both the plans I found started with 1X6 Pine planks.
Cut the oar blanks out of the plank first, then with the pieces left over, glue them to the shaft of the oar to thicken and strengthen.
Then use the Leather and the Ring oar locks, or in one set of plans they modified the boat to recieve the oars.
I want QUIET oars and oarlocks. I hate the sound of the oar locks shifting and squeaking.

LazyJacks table is pretty fancy eh?

LazyJacks idea is to start right out with a 2" board, which leaves you with cutting and shaping, skipping the gluing part of the process.

 

no it is not blow up the photos!! lok at the sketch, geeze pudthuhboho wake up man

 

Good idea to use a 1x6 and save the scrap for the laminated shafts. Absolutely use epoxy as an adhesive to keep those pieces together.
In the case of oars, I think flat-sawn rather than quarter-sawn will be less likely to split down the line.

A.

 

I have made a number of paddles, both canoe and doubled ended kayak, out of red cedar, doug fir and western hemlock. I also own some spruce oars (I bought at a garage sale for $15). I have seen ash and white oak oars, and they are traditional wood for oars, but they are heavier and more difficult to work than soft woods. Cedar and spruce are much lighter and easier to work than ash or oak, and they work just fine. If you are worried about the strength you can always make them a bit larger diameter at the oar lock area (the point of highest stress).

I think you could use any reasonably clear fine grained wood. Oars, like boats, have been made from anything and everything, what ever is available. The soft woods will get beat up looking if you bang them around on docks and shore, but the strength to weight ratio for cedar, spruce and doug fir are actually higher than for hardwoods. And this wood is less costly and easier to work too.

For quieter oars (and paddles) I suggest consider using a higher aspect ratio blade design (length to width ratio) and making the tip elliptical shape (rounded), and have both faces smooth arcs (no rib down the center) with rounded edges (no square edges). Look at traditional Greenland and Aleut kayak paddle blades for example of excellent high aspect ratio blade designs for being silent and efficient. This will make less turbulence, making them quieter, and more efficient too (more forward thrust for the same muscle power input). a similar blade will work just fine for an oar, enlarging the area so they are the same number of square inches as a conventional oar.

 

Well, I did kinda mis-understand LazyJacks photos to be links. I didnt know you could do that.
I looked at 1X6", 1X8" and 2X8" today at Lowes. Then I began to wonder about Treated lumber? Would it be better?

The Labels didnt say what kind of wood it was. But it was soft. There is one more option locally where they sell Rough-cut Pine that is treated and guarenteed for life. He said I could lay it on the ground and build a house on it and it would outlast everyone in my family.

I'm gonna get a 1X4" and test is for strength. Maybe If I find a good enough piece I'll waste some Epoxy and glue two pieces together and test them for strength.

I walked the whole store looking for ideas to build Oarlocks and Sockets out of that would be quiet. There's lots of things to use, but buying standard bronze circle locks and sockets would be just as cheap and a lot less labor.

I'll look up the Aleuit Paddles tonite some time and see what I can do there.
That design may be a plus, but the noise I was talking about was the oarlocks loose in the sockets and the squeek of the socke/lockpin joint.

I completed the handle to my Potato Spade tonite. It was sawn out of a 2" piece of Pine. Four feet long. I stood on it, suspended between two blocks, and it held my 250# just fine. So Oars of that same size will be just great.
So now I have some experience makeing a round shaft out of square stock.

 

Do not use treated lumber for your ores. They have toxic chemicals in them to keep the bugs and fungus away from it, and it would get on your skin when you use them, and you would breath it when you cut and sanded it. Besides as you shaped and sanded the wood, most of the treated material will be removed from the oar, so why bother?

There is no advantage if you keep the oars out of the weather anyway, especially if you keep a good quality finish on it, which also acts to preserve the wood. You do not normally store oars in the water.

I agree, buying oarlocks is more practical. Perhaps you can fine a way to use plastic inserts and some kind of lubricant in standard oarlocks to keep them silent. One of the reasons I like kayak paddles, total silence. It seems it would not be too difficult to alter standard locks to be more quiet.

 

Nothing could be cheaper and simpler that snagging a couple of spruce 2x6s chosen out of dozens of rejects--- either at Lowes or better, an independant yard who get their wood from local mills.
Thicken the shafts, if need be, with scrap glued on to make full 1 3/4" to 2" .
Spruce is what most dimensiional lumber is made from, at lowes and Home Depot, and elsewhere. Our local Home depot has eastern white spruce. So does our local Lowes.
I work in carpentry every day and I often see clear and perfect 2x spruce lumber emerging out of piles of knotty planks. I save it aside for boat wood. For boats, it's worth many times more than the few dollars it costs.
Pine is weaker than spruce, unless southern pine, which is seldom found for sale untreated. Untreated, it would make excellent oar stock. Lighter than ash, it is extremely tough wood.
Southern pine is often seen made into slats for bed frames, for example.
White pine is commonly sold at Lowes and Home Depot, at least on the east coast. To get clear stock from those stores costs a bundle. As said, though, the white pine is not very strong compared to spruce. How much weaker? Maybe, guessing, 15% weaker in terms of how oars are stressed.

 

Nothing could be cheaper and simpler that snagging a couple of spruce 2x6s chosen out of dozens of rejects--- either at Lowes or better, an independant yard who get their wood from local mills.
Thicken the shafts, if need be, with scrap glued on to make full 1 3/4" to 2" .
Spruce is what most dimensiional lumber is made from, at lowes and Home Depot, and elsewhere. Our local Home depot has eastern white spruce. So does our local Lowes.
I work in carpentry every day and I often see clear and perfect 2x spruce lumber emerging out of piles of knotty planks. I save it aside for boat wood. For boats, it's worth many times more than the few dollars it costs.
Pine is weaker than spruce, unless southern pine, which is seldom found for sale untreated. Untreated, it would make excellent oar stock. Lighter than ash, it is extremely tough wood.
Southern pine is often seen made into slats for bed frames, for example.
White pine is commonly sold at Lowes and Home Depot, at least on the east coast. To get clear stock from those stores costs a bundle. As said, though, the white pine is not very strong compared to spruce. How much weaker? Maybe, guessing, 15% weaker in terms of how oars are stressed.

 

oar stock

I work at a fence company, and built some oars out of white cedar. They came out OK but I did have some problems with the wood warping as it was cut. I had to steam the oars and reverse bend them till they were straight. Point is, I used a 5" X 5" X 8' fence post to rip out full 1-3/4" blanks

 

Well, there's obviously two good ways to do this. Either way sounds like fun, and a lot less expense.
I guess Homemade Oar locks and Oar lock sockets are next.
Maybe this winter I'll get to this project.

Thank you all for the great ideas and suggestions.