I’m just renovating a late 1950s (or early 60s) copper tipped blade and thought I’d share some images with you.

This is a girder shafted (solid, not hollow) Aylings blade. If it looks familiar you may have remembered another blade I painted a while back. However, this one has some bad cracks in it and requires much more work.

To ensure that I could see all the cracks properly and be able to do a proper repair, I decided to remove the copper tip. Each of the copper nails was carefully removed so that I could reuse them.

With the tip removed and a generous application of paint stripper, the blade quickly shed almost 60 years of old paint. The timber looks surprisingly clean under all that!

To better repair the cracks, I was forced to gently pull apart some of the old repairs so that I could re-do them. At the moment the blade is buried under tape and clamps while the epoxy has time to cure.

There is an old joke or a rowing ‘meme’ for just about every seat in an eight. One of these refers to three seat as the place that has no real role and has the least effect on the boat. This seat might be best seen as “mostly harmless” and it is certainly where you hide a new rower of untested skill. It is a little politically incorrect with it’s naming, but the “3-tard” seat is well known to most rowers.

I have now worked out why three seat has been rowing so badly!

Back in 2017 the topic of built in pitch was mentioned. See here…but in a nutshell, older oars often had pitch built in and could be easily identified as either bow or stroke side.

As you can see in the picture, the blade is set at a very different angle to the flat backstrap of the oar.

I have just been repairing some old blades and noticed a small problem with one…

It doesn’t matter if you write “3” on it.
It doesn’t matter if you put a green button on it.
If it has been carved as a stroke side blade, then it is a stroke side blade!!!

In the image above, both oars are clearly pitched as stroke side. I can’t imagine how difficult it was to row with the oar on the left!

We owe a huge apology to three seat of any crew over 30 years ago from an unnamed school in Dorset!