My paddles... the process so far

Well I've been working on a pair of paddles I made what seems like an eternity ago, and only in the last two weeks did I finally order the leather and attach it. The paddles are pretty straight forward, and are maple paddles stained with faux cherry and covered on one side with a 2" strip of veggie tanned cow hide.

They progressed like so:
Attachment 31531

In this picture the paddles are cut, the edges have been rounded on the router table, and they have been stained. One also got a bit (too much) crox because I was an impatient person. Removing it later was annoying...

Attachment 31532

Here you can see the leather strips I cut. I did not have a lot of leather working tools, so I improvised. All 4 of those 2 inch strips came from a single 3" belt of veggie tanned cowhide. I cut them using a utility knife and a metal T square.

It's also worth noting that 2.75" is probably the widest I could have made these with this particular leather, as the belts were not perfectly straight IMO.

Attachment 31533

Here's a pic of one of the paddles with a leather blank on it. It's not glued in this picture, but fortunately both of them turned out quite well as far as gluing was concerned. I wish I had taken pictures of the gluing process though.

Attachment 31534

Here they are during the gluing process. Hopefully I used enough clamps...

I allowed each paddle to dry around 18 hours while clamped in this fashion. The leather is uniformly attached, and should not be going anywhere for the next couple of decades at least :).

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Here is a picture of one of the finished paddles alongside one of my two spare blanks. The picture quality is bad, but it should still be readily obvious that I have done something to the leather just based on the color alone. This leads me to a questoin, which I was originally going to post in this thread, but I decided to post in a different thread because this one was already becoming too long.

The surface has a nice, almost suede like quality, and feels a slight bit rubbery. It has a lovely draw, I could probably even increase the draw a little more, but I don't think it needs it. As it stands it feels VERY similar to my 2" SRD latigo strop when I worked it to have a heavier draw (and before I worked it to have a glassy draw :w).

The process went like this:

Two seperate coats of Fromm, a hand sanding at 600 grit, 1000 grit, 1500 grit, then back down to 600 grit, as well as a little Ballistol because the blade I stropped on it had Ballistol on it. All of this probably took me about 45 minutes to do (in additon to the work on the paddle and cutting the blanks, gluing, etc). I think I could probably get this time period down to 25-30 minutes, but it's still a bit trying.


For the record, this is a sickness... I'm not even finished these two paddles, yet I've already decided I want to make at least 3 more of them in real cherry and either somehow sell or trade these (since they are beautiful, but I won't need them if I had cherry paddles..). Those 3 paddles are going to be for CrOx, CeOx, and a plain leather version for travel. THEN I want to make at least 1 or 2 more of them just in case I ever decide I want to try yet another paste.

Yeah. Start by making 2, end up making 7 - using 3, hoarding 2 for the shavepocalypse, and letting 2 go. :rotflmao:. Oh, and I'm still not done deciding on the finish for all of them, but that is for another thread.