Paddle repair
Thursday, August 9, 2007, 7 comments
Last sunday one of my best paddles broke at a rolling class - a strong guy forgot what the class was about and tried to roll up with brute force instead of technique. 6" from the tip the paddle snapped.
My initial reaction was to discard it and build a new. But on the way home I began thinking of a repair. This is how it turned out.
I glued the parts together with epoxy, lining them up carefully edge to edge.
Next step was to remove damaged wood, both sides. I did this with the table saw - lightly pushing the paddle sideways over the blade. If the paddle blade is very thin you may have to do one side at a time, but I left 2 mm wood in the middle and did both sides in one go.
Two pieces of 3 mm veneer were sanded to shape.
Dry run with the filler pieces.
Thickened epoxy and a piece of fibre glass cloth (reinforcing, but primarily to hold epoxy in the joint when pressure is applied).
Filler pieces in place and clamped.
This is the idea…
…and this is how it turned out, after some sanding and a coat of pine tar plus linseed oil to even out the color differences.
