Greenland paddle from a tree, Step 1 - 19 January 2023

Birch trees, particularly silver birch, seem to be popular for landscaping in our area.   Unfortunately, they seem to have a short lifetime as trees go, something around 40-50 years in our area.  To be honest, I am not sure the particular trees I am talking about are silver birch, but that is my best guess.  About 40 years ago, the builder of our neighborhood put three birch trees in our back yard as specimen trees.  They formed a nice contrast against the dominant evergreens (cedar, fir, and a redwood or two - I think the redwood is a specimen tree, too, by the way), but the birches never really liked out winters.  At least, they were constantly shedding smaller branches, but the snowloads would bring down major parts of the tree. 

In a winter storm about five years ago (c. 2018), the two larger trees were snapped off.  One was badly damaged and I removed it, while the other was severly damaged and I was hoping it would recover.  Well, after four years, I decided it was not going to recover, that it was worsening to the point that it was threatening to fall on the house, so I took it down.

Most of the 40-foot-plus tree became bark mulch or firewood, but I kept a 12-foot section from the base of the tree.  My plan is to make a Greenland paddle from it.  With luck, I might even be able to get two paddles from it.  I hope to be able to get an 8-10-foot 8x8 out of the trunk that I can use for the paddles.

I started by leaving the trunk on sawhorses outside the garage.  While this was convenient and gave me free space in the garage (workshop), I think it greatly slowed the drying of the wood that is required to work it.  I used a small chainsaw to remove one side (hidden on the bottom in the photo) in a crude styling of an Alaskan sawmill, but that did not work well.  I finally decided my only option was to bring the log inside the protected space of the house - the unheated garage will keep the log out of the rain.

The log has been sitting in the garage for about two weeks, and it is already looking drier.  This could be wishful thinking; likely is wishful thinking.  As an experiment last night, I took an electric planer and started trying to remove the bark as a poor-man's jointer.  The chainsaw was faster but I think the planer produces much better results.  The resulting wood is prettier than I expected.  All the talk of Baltic birch brings plain grain to my mind, and this looks to be more interesting.  The interesting bit may be planed off in the end.  We shall see.

Unofficially, my moisture meter shows 34%.  I suspect this is optimistic as most of the readings are "off the charts" - too moist to measure.  I hope a few more weeks in the garage will show the needle moving in the right direction.

Roll, do not brush - 14 August 2022

Having applied fiberglass to the bottom of the kayak, it was time to apply epoxy to fill the weave, creating a smooth surface for final finishing with varnish (to protect the epoxy from UV destruction).  For the fiberglass, I used a scraper to apply a thin coat of epoxy.  For the first fill coat, I used a foam roller to apply the epoxy, and it went quite smoothly.  I was happy with the uniformity of the resulting coat.  I was concerned about the amount of wasted epoxy left in the foam roller when I was done with the application, so I decided to use a chip brush to apply the second filler coat.  Although the brushed coat seemed to use less epoxy and it left a smooth coat, it also had two problematic consequences.  First, the inexpensive chip brushes tend to shed bristles; this is no surprise, but I did have to stay alert to remove the bristles so they did not set in the epoxy to become permanent features of the kayak.  The second problem is that the brush left a thick layer that had a tendency to slump and drip on the more vertical surfaces of the kayak.  This will require quite a bit of sanding to make fair.  I plan to return to the roller for future applications of expoy filler and the coats of varnish.  I will use the brushes for areas that are not amenable to rolling, such as the areas around the coaming.

I also learned why being generous can sometimes leave one in a bit of a pickle.  During the construction class, the instructor suggested that people share epoxy bottles so as to reduce the number of epoxy stations that were needed.  I volunteered to let my adjacent colleague draw from my bottles.  The kayak kit comes with a gallon of epoxy, and that sounded nearly infinite to me.  Well, I ran out today, and I am not yet done.  I ordered a half-gallon kit, but it will take time to ship from the East coast, so my construction is temporarily stalled.  I guess I can go back and sand down some of those drips.