I love kayak fishing and thought it would be amazing to design my own custom paddles. I’m curious if CNC could be a good option for creating unique paddle shapes and designs, especially to make them lightweight and efficient for long trips on the water.
I’ve been exploring gear ideas on (spam was here), but now I’d like to dive into the idea of customizing paddles with CNC. Has anyone tried a similar project? Any advice on the materials or CNC techniques that work best for paddle crafting?
Unless you need to do some sort of layered construction, it should be as simple as having it carve one face, then flipping it over and having it carve the other, cutting the final piece out of the source plank/glue-up/whatever you want to call it, and post-processing (trimming the tabs, sanding, finishing, etc).
Alternatively, you could do each half separately and glue them together, but I don’t know if that’s good for paddles (and kinda doubt it is).
You could get relatively advanced with this, or just make basic ones and carve a pattern into them for a visual flair.
Just thinking it they but perhaps you could use the M4 to cut a mould into wood for the paddle and then pour in a liquid material that will set and be the paddle.
What materials do you want to build the paddles from?
How much experience do you have with CAD?
CAD might be the biggest hurdle if you have no experience from before. The learning curve can be steep.
The load on paddles can be significant so choice of materials and construction is important. Especially if there is no backup paddle on board
Cutting from plywood would probably not be feasible without reinforcing with fibers+epoxy. Solid wood is a valid option but still needs reinforcement after cutting if you want light weight and durability.
If building in wood I would have cut moulds with the CNC and used veneers under vacuum in the mould to consolidate.If using just carbon I would have done the same, but of course adapted the design of the moulds for that process.
For sure CNC is a great tool. Especially if you can draw up a 3D model of what you want in CAD. But kayak paddles was made by hand before CNC arrived so depending on what designs you want to do and what process you want to use the answer would be “it depends”.
