It's time for me to replace my basic bent shaft paddles that I made with my canoe years ago. Of course I'm too capable of making them myself to buy any, but have fallen in love with the hollow core big name brands for obvious reasons.

My question, has anyone made a paddle of such description? Did you simply hollow out material of the laminate pieces before gluing up the bent shaft portion? If you went the birds-mouth joint way like they do for masts, how did you get/transition to your bent shaft?

I live in Iowa, and have a long winter for playing in the shop. Not too concerned about complexity.

I’ve made several of the birdsmouth shaft paddles. I found a blog or something about 10 years ago where the guy mentioned how to do the birdsmouth. In his plan, the shaft was cut with a real long angle- like 75-80 degrees at the end and then that long angle face was simply epoxied right to the blade. The idea was epoxy is strong enough to hold.

I made a few real nice paddles this way. The birdsmouth shaft is really a nice shaft and ultralight and strong… and I even made them a little bit oval in shape for ergonomics … but over the years they have either started to seperate at the shaft/blade union or have separated completely already. I made 5 or 6 of them and maybe have one intact still. I wouldn’t do that.

Instead- There were other designs where a normal or bent shaft blade was made with a Tenon and the tenon is inserted and epoxied into the hollow birdsmouth shaft. I would think that would be a good design.