Do it with style?!

Dr. Emmett Brown, "The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"

Stuber, "If your gonna build a time machine into a boat why not use a Whitehall?"

As the sayer of that statement here is why. Whitehalls have no place in whitewater. Although for a brief time after the middle of the 1800's they became all the rage as small work boats and water taxis. So while a DeLorien would clearly raise suspicion on a road in the 1800's why not turn to a little work boat into a time machine? For starters Powell's boats were not your normal breed.

I like to think of them as little floating brick shit houses.

 

Something like this but more 1800ish.

So how does a project like this start? With oars my friends oars and sweeps. The longer boats 22ft started with two rowing stations and 11.5ft oars. These were cut down to 8 ft during the trip and a sweep was added to the boats. These were big Ash affairs (Ha!). Each boat had four oars and one sweep. Assuming that the group was prepared (like the boy scouts of yore) they should have (could have) had two spares per boat for a total of seven. Multiply that in twain and you get??? Fourteen,  fourteen custom oars that all must match. here is the beginning of that operation.

 A sharp chisel will go a long way but the patters below will help standardize all of these oars.

 Clamp em up and saw em out.

One must always start with a center line  Especially with something as fickle as wood, it changes. Pull a line and project it down with a tri-square.

 With many to make one must be careful to do it right layout is everything,

EVERYTHING!

 Here are some of the tools of the trade. All of them except the mug and Japanese saw would have been recognized by the original builders.

 Take it down to the line,

 add to the pile,

repeat.