For years I paddled only shallow rocky rivers, with cheap big box store paddles. Tried one of these paddles when I moved to doing a bit of lake travel and the difference was night and day.... and they look nice too.Nice looking paddle, not my favourite style of blade, but look like you did a great job!!
So if not an ottertail for deep water, what's everyone's preference?
I do have some power tools that help for making laminated shafts, a jointer, band saw and a thickness planner. I use a hand held electric planner to take off most of the excess, normal hand tools would work just fine, just more time consuming. Once the blade is roughly shaped I take out the hand planes and spoke shaves.Very good looking paddles. Did you build them with hand tools or do you have a shop with bigger powers tools like plainers etc.?
Some of us are non-animal tail paddle users. I prefer something like a Sugar Island type blade. Perhaps we could call it a modified beaver tail, if the beaver tail was 8 inches wide and the blade was cut in half, but then it wouldn't really look like a beaver tail. So I guess I'll just say I like a shorter, wider blade that doesn't resemble any animal tails.
I like the look of your paddles, but it seems you have widened them out considerably from a regular otter tail What's the widest measurement?