Good [Paddles] Come From Experience; Experience Comes From Bad [Paddles]

I've been spending a lot of time shaping my steering paddle and one propulsion paddle from the thick laminated blanks.  In the process, I'm really working the old Stanley block plane hard, producing an impressive quantity of curly cedar and fir shavings.  My planing muscles are pretty achy, and I'm blistering in the places where the plane fits my hand awkwardly.  All for relatively meager progress - extrapolating, I can expect at least a month more of this before the paddles are properly shaped.

It is for this reason that I decided to trace the taper onto the edges of the blades and trim them down with my circular saw.  Ten minutes worth of cutting would save weeks of shaving, I reasoned.  And I'm pretty good at following a line with that tool.  It seemed like a judicious application of power tools.

A badly scarred blade.  Even
Elliott, sighting along the blade,
is disappointed in the result.

My first pass on the left side of the steering paddle cut a bit too deeply.  At the time, I thought it was due to the not-quite-square edge I was resting the saw on.  When I flipped the paddle and the second left-side cut turned out even worse, I should have understood what was going on.  But instead I went on and cut the other paddle, giving the line a little extra room to avoid repeating the problem.

It turns out that my circular saw was slightly out of square; the thin cuts I have been doing lately were in material (plywood, thin lumber...) too thin to show the angle, but cutting a full three-plus inches deep, it was very noticeable.  The fact that the right-side cuts were turning out okay, while the left-side cuts were not, should have clued me in.  But sometimes we're resistant to the lessons available to us.  It takes a real mess to open our eyes to the problem.

That red line is the center of
the edge.  The worst error
didn't just eat into the paddle
surface, it ate half of that
side of the paddle away.

The steering paddle is badly scarred; I'm going to have to add material somehow, either by laminating some strips of wood back onto the worst area, or by building the surface up with thickened epoxy. And that means I won't be able to use a clear finish on it.  Sigh....

This paddle was not as badly disfigured, but it's
still going to be thinner and weaker than I
meant for it to be.

The propulsive paddle turned out better.  It is going to be thinner at the end than I meant to make it, but not terribly so; I will probably glass the blade to increase its durability, but that's okay, I have scrap glasscloth and epoxy, and I was considering glassing it anyway.

The big lesson here is that it's always a mistake to use the wrong tool.  The kind of shaping I'm attempting really ought to done with a bandsaw and belt sander, not a block plane.  Lacking a belt sander, but wanting faster progress than I was getting with the plane, I tried a circular saw.... You can't use a circular saw to do delicate shaping, any more than you can use a hammer or a soldering iron.  So I'm going to check Craigslist and pawn shops for inexpensive belt sanders.  And in the meantime, I'll be muttering the wise words of Mr. Miyagi under my breath while I endlessly plane away the worst of my mistakes: "Wax on, wax off."