I once fixed a lose shaft by applying a thin coat of epoxy to the insert portion of the shaft and sanding to fit.
1 Like
Buy a new paddle!
1 Like
You have nothing to lose trying to apply a thin coat of epoxy on the male end of the paddle ferrule, but it will take time and careful sanding to get it to fit snugly and evenly in the female end.
Taking it to a machine shop after temporarily removing the push button and applying a coat of epoxy on the male half would be the method for attaining the most precise fit for both halves. Probably a bit of overkill.
Werner and Bending Branches had no suggestions and considered it normal wear with my old paddles.
You could also epoxy the halves together which makes the paddle harder to transport. You would want to splint the halves so that the paddle shaft cures straight. Feather angle is irrelevant because you should not be changing your feather angle once you find the one that works best for you.
Iâll just add a suggestion here regarding an easy splinting material / method for keeping the paddle shaft perfectly straight while the adhesive cures.
Get a length of angle iron that is long enough to overlap the joint by a fair distance. A total length of two feet will be plenty, but longer will be okay. Carefully sight down the length of the piece before buying it to make sure it hasnât been bent in shipping (usually if itâs bent, itâs bent enough to be obvious). You can also check by setting it on a flat floor, first with both edges against the floor, then with just the corner against the floor, to help spot any bending (it wonât be bent in the other two directions but you can check them anyway if it makes you happy). Get the angle iron in a small enough nominal size that when the round shaft of the paddle is set into the inside bend of the material, it still protrudes âoutside of the bendâ by some amount. I would guess that 1.25" x 1.25" would be just about perfect, but any size from 1.0" x 1.0" to 1.5" x 1.5" would likely work fine. If some portion of the shaftâs cross section occupies space âoutside the bendâ of the angle iron, that makes it easier to bind the paddle shaft snugly into the the splint, using tape, multiple wraps of string, or something similar. When snugly bedded into a piece of straight angle iron in this way, the paddle shaft will be maintained straight in all orientations so thereâs no need for two splints. You could build a splint that would do this but it would take some very careful work to make it as straight as what a piece of undamaged angle iron already is. The few dollars in cost will be worth it in terms of simplifying the job.
Itâs very possible that even a âlooseâ joint wonât have enough slop to result in noticeable bending of the shaft at the location of the joint, but if the joint fits so badly that thereâs noticeable wobble / bending action, by all means splint it as recommended. And splinting it is still âthe right wayâ, in principle, even if you canât really see that it accomplishes anything.