Restoring wooden oars for my pulling boat

Hello folks: This being my first post, I'll be brief. I acquired "Wee Cloud" a carvel-planked 14' pulling boat with a set of gorgeous lightweight wooden oars. The leathers were all rotted and one oar has a chip out of the blade tip. Tips for removing the old brads holding the leathers? Some heads have rotted off. Tips for repairing the blade tip? A piece on the edge, about 1/4" by 1.5" has chipped off. Thanks

 

Not knowing what tools or woodworking experience you have handy, I'll just describe what I would do.

Blade chip: with a sharp plane, cut back the broken corner to a perfectly flat face, epoxy on a slightly oversize piece of dry sitka spruce, and shape to match the rest of the oar when cured. The trick is to plan the planed surface so that some sort of clamp can be used to hold things together while the epoxy cures. Tape can be used if all else fails. Use a good epoxy like WEST or MAS. Absolutely do not use any kind of 5-minute epoxy. If you pay attention to the grain direction and spacing the repair will still be obvious but not offensive.

Leather nails: putting nails into it right at the area of greatest stress is a lousy thing to do to a nice spruce oar, but it's all too common. I would not worry too much about getting the old nails out -- get what you can without further damaging the oar. But I would try to work some thin epoxy (WEST etc) into the wounds as much as possible, to slow down water intrusion. On spruce oars, I like a couple of coats of epoxy, put on thin with a WEST roller and well sanded, under the varnish. When the varnish is good and hard I put the leathers on with contact cement, wrapping them well with tape until the cement is good and dry. If you must, lacing them on is much better than nailing. Of course, you always row with the seam up, so the seam has to line up with the oar blade.

These days, I will admit to just rolling on a length of bicycle inner tube and calling it good, though.