We’ve looked at the amount of preparation time involved in repairing oars, but this batch are almost done. The primer and undercoat has been applied and with any luck most of these will be ready right away for the top coat in club colours. Sometimes the undercoat shows up a few extra things to fill or sand that may not have been visible on the odd coloured surfaces below.

This is a bit of a motley bunch. A few blade only, a couple of coastal rowing blades, an interesting one with a fluted girder shaft (and copper tip, just out of view) and a fairly conventional blade.

I really should get a bigger workshop…

Almost all modern oars are set to zero pitch at the oarlock so that you can rig using the pitch insert bushings. This was not always the case.

The shape of the macon blade was such that a much higher pitch was desired and the clever adjustable plastic oarlocks had not yet been invented.

To ensure adequate pitch, the oars were made with ample pitch built in. You could tell what side of the boat a blade should be on even if there were no numbers, markings or helpful red/green buttons.

This particular blade (late ’70s from Hungary, I think) shows this quite clearly. It measures on screen at about 4 degrees.

Late January and early February were busy with three jobs overlapping; two of which had event deadlines. Those two are now delivered and presented as gifts, and the final one is awaiting the globe-trotting owner to travel past these shores to collect it.

Each job had at least one new challenge to be met.

Mixing a pot of Cambridge blue isn’t the easiest task (especially since it is green), because even if you can decide which one of the many hues used by the crews to pick (we chose the official university stationery guide colour), it is still very difficult for paint shops to match exactly to a PMS colour code.

Painting a quartered oar isn’t as easy as you might think. You can’t mask off and paint one colour, then the other. To get nice clean lines on each corner you actually need to do four separate painting sessions.

The final blade wasn’t as challenging from a technical viewpoint, but it managed to cause a few headaches along the way by requiring a full repaint and a more complex section join (both mentioned in previous posts). I did find the more pronounced spline on the blade face a bit more difficult to paint around, but I was still very pleased with the final job.