Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop by Nick Offerman

Author:Nick Offerman [Offerman, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

BEAVER TAIL PADDLE

MORE FROM NICK OFFERMAN

MAKING THE BEAVER TAIL PADDLE

Okay, friend, you have arrived. A canoe paddle is a great project in which to become comfortable with some of our most useful hand tools. This is my absolute favorite item to make in (or out of) the shop, unless I have time to make the whole damn canoe, which would then certainly take the cake. On one hand, you can trace this legendary shape on a plank of suitable wood and cut it out. On the other, you can glue up a blank from otherwise useless shop scraps and head for the very same finish line. I can think of few finer manifestations that a plank of wood can undergo than beginning life anew as an outdoor accessory so indispensable that an idiom was created saying as much. Everybody knows that if you are in trouble of any sort, then you, my friend, are up a creek without one of these handy water-shovels.

The fact that so much of this implement is fashioned with hand tools allows me to sit on a porch, or a nice patch of grass beneath a tree, preferably in earshot of a burbling stream or a neighborhood of finches, or both, and shave away at my blank until my paddle is ready to see me propelled upstream to the place where the deer come to drink. Of course, many of my paddles are made in my slightly less-than-pastoral shop in Los Angeles, but between Jeff Tweedy on the stereo and the sycamore glade in my head, I am still able to get to a happy place.

Please note that I am not an expert paddler, or an adventure enthusiast of the ilk who likes to paddle a fully loaded boat for eight hours a day into the wilderness. My paddles are not designed for a marathon, but very much for the effective motoring and steering of a pleasure jaunt on a river, lake, or stream. The nifty thing about paddles, though, is that with a little research you can choose the style that suits your needs/tastes/arms the best, and simply change the original template accordingly. The subsequent steps remain the same, by and large.

I first learned to carve paddles from Ted Moores’s seminal treatise Canoecraft, and, as with so many repeatable shop projects, have made my own tweaks to the design and build methods, but there are only so many ways to skin this particular cat. Something I love about the project, however, and so many similar moments in boatbuilding, is that you are relying less upon the combination square and the caliper and more upon your eye and your judgment. Since there is hand carving involved, every paddle will turn out a little different, which is completely fine—all you care about is if it works well. It’s not a drawer that needs to fit into a case just so, for the optimal opening and closing. A paddle is not furniture. It’s a long-handled, flat wooden spatula that you will use to move and navigate a canoe through water.

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