Curved gouge chisel

This handy little chisel cost me less than £4.00. But you can use it to gouge out the convave surface on the hand grip of your paddle. Whacking it with a mallet does the job, but it cuts really neat little concave slivers and she's easy to control so you only take out as much wood as you want.

I've only used flat chisels before, and they wander all over the place and generally dive under the grain of the wood. Not this one though, easy to guide to get it just right.

2P4: Two part paddle practice piece

Plan to throw one away.

This is the prototype two part paddle. Square section pine epoxied to an 18mm board about a foot long. Also pleased because gluing the shaft to the blade seems to work just fine and is considerably cheaper than carving from a single piece.

Then used the prototype to make sure that I could successfully shape a blade according to the method in the paddles book.

It seems I can.

Gunwales Take 2

The new home brewed router table was in action today, rounding over another 12m of the 18x28 strip I'm using for the gunwales. Then scarf them and glue them.

Also made a smidgeon of progress on the paddle: glued the handle pieces on.

MkII Router Table

I don't claim originality for this, but here is the MKII router table, zero cost.

First off, make a new base for the router. I used a spare piece of 6mm ply. Remove the plastic "shoe" on the bottom of the base, and use this as a template for drilling the plywood. Attach the plywood base to the router instead of the original plastic one.

Set the router on the base into the workmate. On the right is the 4x2 used as a guide fence. Using a forstner bit (or a hole saw), cut out a semi circle in the fence to accommodate the router bit. On the left is the bit guard, that helps keep my fingers out, made from scraps of 2x1 and 32mm square timber. The piece is fed from the near end to the far end. In use, the fence will be set about an inch to the left of the position shown to guide the work over the correct part of the blade.

Size Matters.

Hmmm. Looking at those gunwales they look a bit wide to me. 18x44 (2x1) planed may not be the way to go after all. I only did it because I had a load left over from a project. Bit of a nuisance given the time to rout, scarf, glue, but as they taught me in scuba school, do it once, do it right.

I'll pop down to Wickes in my lunch break and see what else they have.

When Scarf Joints Attack!

The plans call for me to scarf together a three piece gunwale. I need 5 meters for each side, and want the joints on the gentlest curves, but I realise these pieces add up to about 6m each. My average sized garage wasn't up to the task, so I had to glue them in the dining room and kitchen.

Don't tell Mrs.

The router table

To make the gunwales, I needed to round over the edges of the 2x1. With nearly fifteen linear metres to do, a router table was called for.

Rather than spend eighty quid at Screwfix, the solution was to clamp the router in my workmate. The block on the left is the guide fence, and the block on the right is the safety fence to keep fingers away. The router power switch if held on with a clamp, and a circuit breaker allows me to turn it off and on easily.

Using a rounding over bit, the job was done in twenty minutes.