Walker Bay 6', 2-piece Mississippi oars

[CapnK]

The Christmas Day Storm of '09 storm set one of my Caveness oars free, leaving the other to languish dockside when I wasn't otherwise busily engaged paddling around in circles... The singularity of that oar, and the fact that I don't have a lathe hidden onboard somewhere in Katie Marie's 25-and-one-half feet of LOA with which to produce another, determined that the purchase of a new set of oars was in order.

After much anguishing and deferment of actually having to give the credit card number away, some shopping soon showed that the best price was to buy a pair of two-piecers from Defender.com. Don't let the $23.99/per fool ya - that, x2, along with an additional and totally unreasonable $28.00 (!!!) for shipping (for the "extra size"? C'mon, UPS, these are only 3' long, package girth is less than 18", weight under 5#'s...) still tipped the kitty for a bit over $76 total. Still and all, Defender's price made it more economical for me to buy these, than a single replacement oar like the one I already have.

So NOW, for the dinghy, I have a set of oars... *and* a dedicated yuloh.  :D

I was a little disappointed in the oars as they arrived from the manufacturer. The joints are produced of some kind of plastic (durability and UV resistance yet to be determined), and the fit of wooden handle or blade to the join was almost criminally poor. Per oar, one on each side of the joining pieces, was a single SS screw, phillips head, under 3/4" in length, screwed into the oar shaft thru a hole in the joining piece.

:P :P :P

Lame! Very much so. The oars, brand new, already had play in them. I don't think that screw would have lasted a season, especially not one with many hard pulls in it, so I set out to rectify the situation. Below are some pics which show what I did.

Materials: Blue tape, a Phillips screwdriver, a toothpaste-tube sized 3M 5200, a fresh rag (or one with lots of wipe-offability left in it). The steps are, in short:

1) Remove the lame-o screw and joining piece from the oar shaft.
2) Tape off about 1/16 from the edge of the joint on the shaft.
3) (Not pictured, because the stuff is too goopy and runny to stop for a pic...) Cover the exposed wood that would otherwise be inside the joining piece in a nice, thick layer of 3M 5200. Make note of where the screw hole is! I left it uncovered.
4) Push joining piece back down onto oar shaft. Attempt to replace lame-o screw into original hole. Curse the fact that its hole is now covered by 5200, requiring many tries to get just right. Make a mental note for future to mark blue tape to show hole alignment, and promptly forget this for each of the next 3 shafts, cursing every time.
5) Wipe excess 5200 off of everything in sight, and a few things that weren't (hey, it's 5200 - it happens, inherently...). Especially, look inside the joining pieces, clean excess from inside of them so that eventually, 'joining of the pieces' can still occur.
6) Let dry, making sure to stand them with joining pieces *up*, and afterwards - enjoy the solid feel of oars as if they had been made by a quality factory or otherwise producer.

Once the shafts are bonded to the joining pieces, there is a very good tight fit with the joiners and the oars feel very solid, as much as a one-piece does, so the joining pieces seem to be engineered and produced well. I think I'll be happy with using these now, otherwise I don't think I would have. I considered using epoxy as the fill material, but decided that the flexibility of the adhesive was more called for in this usage.

[Tim]

 ;D It just goes to prove that there is no job so little that one cannot make a weekend of fun out of  ;D

I have a set of solid 9 ' raft oars that I will trim down if necessary for the dinghy that I finally got a coat of paint on this weekend.

[Bubba the Pirate]

CapnK - I feel your pain.  Some time around WWII we decided to stop making things that will last and started designing everything to be 'just' strong enough. 

Tim - what dinghy did you build? 


Todd

[Tim]

Todd

Don't want to hijack the Capn's thread, but it's a little sailing pram Prameke a few more pics of it my Galleries link in my profile thingy