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Comment by Troy Nicolls on February 25, 2011 at 4:19pm

Rick

 

You got it. I just flipped the oar (blade)over and routed the other side. I indexed the blade using 2 holes on the blade end of the oar which were centered and about an inch from each end. Funny you researched router lathes. I had never heard of a router lathe until AFTER I built one. When I finished my oar, I thought using a router was such a good idea, I searched the net and found I can BUY one for a couple grand. I see there are also plans available to build gear driven router lathes using bicycle chain and sprockets or wooden gears. Check out a Canadians website called woodengear.com (I think) pretty cool the machinery he builds using only wood. Search pantarouter...really cool. You don't have to build in metal to make metal like quality equipment.  Yes, a spiraly fluted oar loom built on a homemade wood geared router lathe would be quite the accomplishment...but so would be a hand shaved and carved spirally fluted oar done with grand dads block plane and carving tools. Uugh! I was not meant to have to work...there are too many other fun things to accomplish!

Comment by Rick Newman on February 25, 2011 at 5:42am

Troy, thanks for the info.  If you wanted to return the shaft, loom whatever to the same place to repeat a process you would want a method to do so.  Indexing would be one way. So I would assume that you held the blade in one of two positions to remove material so you had to provide an "index" to do so.  However I'll bet you just flipped it over on the "bed" to achieve the affect.  After I saw your wonderful system I did some investigating and discovered the world of router lathes.  It should would astound the other boaters at the ramp if you had used a router lathe to build an oar with a spiral in the lower loom! Hey Greg Hatten, here's a new idea for you.  Spiraled oars!  Troy thanks again for your update and sharing the project. Check out the home machinist magazines at better bookstores, you will be able to find index units for metal working lathes.  I met a guy who built his own second axle, diferential, etc for an ATV so he could carry a large spray rig to spray weeds on his organic wheat farm . I was intrigued and investigated his use of an indexer for that project.  The whole world of machining metal is intriguing to me.  Thanks again,

 

Rick Newman

Comment by Troy Nicolls on February 24, 2011 at 8:00pm

Index? Hum...metal shop class was 31 years ago, never took wood shop...I'm not sure I remember what indexing is? But I can tell you I simply used waxed wood screws through the ends of the guide bed on each end of the bed.The screws screwed into the center of each end of the oar blank to act as live centers. To round of the square blank, I simply drilled pivot holes 2" from the top of each end of the bed for the live centers. After running the router back and fourth a few times I ended up with a perfectly round loom. To get taper to the loom, I drilled another hole in one end of the bed to raise one of the centers 1/4 inch, then I ran the router to produce a 2" loom tapered to 1 1/2" on the blade end. Routing the blade was a bit different. I had to build a bed with a custom taper to suit my desired end result...which I am quite pleased with. Now that I have a system down, it is time to find a nice newly fallen Oregon Ash log to mill into some good blanks. I figure I have 8 hours into my first oar. I never thought it would take that long, but what the heck...my labor's cheap!

Comment by Rick Newman on February 22, 2011 at 11:09pm

Very exiting stuff! tell us more, please! When you do the loom how did you index it? Thanks for showing us your craftsmanship and I can't wait to hear more about the technique.

 

Rick Newman