I posted a few weeks ago that I was building two Birds Mouth euro style paddles for my 11 yr old son for an upcoming week long river trip on the Altamaha River in GA. I made these paddles as a hybrid of the Birds Mouth canoe paddle design Kurt Maurer shared last year ( I built 4 last year ) and the solid shaft carbon blade design as shown on Duane Strostaker's site.

As the construction progressed, I became a bit concerned about the strength of the shaft at the connection to the blade. Even though I had inserted a 24" plug in the ends of the shafts to make this section solid, I still had concerns. So, I decided to strengthen the shafts with carbon fiber tubing that I had seen on the Soller Composites web site. When he shafts were at the point where they were ready for blade attachment, I covered them from end to end with 8.9oz carbon fiber tubing. The process included threading the cf tubing on the shafts, pulling it taught, wetting out with epoxy and then covering with "heat shrink" tubing and shrinking with a heat gun to get a nice smooth finish. After this cf layup cured, I removed the heat shrink tubing and, wow, the shafts looked fantastic....

I built the blades per Duane Strostraker's plans and even though I've got a few cosmetic flaws, the paddles came out nice and should work well for my son. And, they came out light which was the objective for using the Birds Mouth construction method for the shafts. Finished paddles weigh in at 20.0 and 21.0 oz. That's scary light for 205 and 210 cm euro paddles

Attached is a pic of the finished paddles. I'll follow up with how my son likes them after our 105 mi trip this week concludes.

Here is a link to all the pics on Photobucket...

http://photobucket.com/albums/ll316/beaullieu/BirdsMouth Euro Paddle

Bob Beaullieu