After drooling over several traditionally made and exceptionally beautiful oars here on WBP, I tried my hand at oar making, but with a twist. Since I do not consider myself adept at using (or even sharpening) a hand plane, I decided to make a router lathe to duplicate a spare oar for my old rebuilt 16 footer. The router lathe is simply a 6" x 6" x 9' plywood box with live centers for the oar on each end and a guide to support your router while turning your stock by hand. It is quite simple and produced a nearly perfect oar, however I'm not so certain it was any faster than using traditional methods. I call this oar making for cheaters since it requires only simple machine set-up ability rather than real tool using skill. Still, it was a fun project and now I have a template to produce similar oars..possibly in a little less time.