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.