Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Making Oars

What good is a rowboat without oars? But it turns out that oars in the lengths I need are fairly expensive and perhaps not as good as homemade oars. What I need are two sets of 8’-foot oars. They should be lightweight and relatively easy to make. Most boat builders seem to lean toward oars based on Pete Culler’s designs, and the best web page I could find on making such oars is Don Kurylko’s discussion of his boat project (though you have to scroll way down to see the oars):

http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthread.php?123343-More-photos-of-Don-Kurylko-s-new-boat/page16

For design purposes, the relevant sketch is this one:

I went to the local Home Depot and picked up enough good wood for a trial set of oars. I got lucky and found perfect #1 lumber -- 2 2x2x8 pieces and 1 1x4x8 piece. One 2x2 is used for the core of each oar. The 1x4 is used for both the blades and for the counterweights above the looms, according to the plan in the two drawings below:

Pattern for the Oar Blades

A 5' section of 1x4 is ripped down the middle, giving you two 1 x 1 3/4 planks. Each of these is then sawn on the diagonal, starting at the 2' mark and crossing to the 3' mark. This gives 4 blade pieces that will be glued to each side of the 2x2s.

The "counterweights" are just additional wood that will be in a "jacket" around each 2x2 above the pivot point of the oars. First, I cut off a 34 1/2" section from the remnant of the 1x4x8. Then I ripped it to create one 1 x 1 3/8 plank and one 1 x 2 1/8 plank, as indicated in the pattern below:

Pattern for the Oar Counterweights

The next step was tricky since I needed to rip the thickness of each of these one-inch boards (actually 3/4") in half to create two 3/8" boards. I did that by lightly clamping these 3/4" boards between a couple of sticks of 2" scrap lumber. That gave me a board wide enough so that I could rest the shoe of my circular saw flat while I ripped it in half. These 3/8" boards are not, of course, perfectly dimensioned, but I'll be shaving them down with my plane and my spokeshave anyway.

Finally I screwed some temporary rails onto my plywood-decked flat-bed trailer so that I could clamp the blade pieces to the shafts, as shown here:

With the clamps removed, I have a clunky set of wooden oars, ready to be jacketed and then gradually shaved and sanded into shape. Only time will tell if they work.