Laying out lines takes a lot of careful thinking and planning, checking and rechecking -- especially when there is so little room for error as there is here. On the other hand, bandsawing is relatively quick but requires an intense amount of focus when the stakes are high. One momentary lapse of attention, and the stave could be rendered into firewood -- and my planning for naught.
Well, the moment came and went, and here are the two much thinner staves. One can see the rotted section now in a good section of the stave for coming off in the profiling. From the long view, one can also see the slight jog I had to take to stay within the center of the stave.
Splicing would be a great deal easier if the wood was square or rectangular in cross section, in which case they could be stacked and cut in one go. Instead, I've marked out the waste areas on the sapwood and will need to cut each part carefully, keeping my saw lines totally perpendicular to a theoretical flat back (which is, of course, convex!). You can see the general steps below.
Once cut out, the two sections fit together fairly decently, though not perfectly. Any gaps can be filled with wooden shims so that I'm not depending solely on glue to fulfill any functional aspects. Here are the sections dry fit with an offcut shim of yew in the background.
And here's the finished glued joint after cleaning up any of the squeeze out!
It all looks rather quick and easy here, but it was probably an hour in the marking and cutting, another hour or two in shimming, cursing, and finessing (not all necessarily in that order), a half hour to glue and clamp, 24 to dry, and 10 minutes to unclamp and clean it up. Whew!
Now that the splice is complete, I can see that there is a bit of propellor twist at the very ends and a very slight amount of deflex. I'll plan to heat treat the belly to see if I can't get a bit of reflex into it while correcting some of the twist at the tips.
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