Day 5, Skin on Frame River Touring Kayak: Finishing the deck and oiling the frame.
I added the aft deck and foredeck stringers mostly following my usual formula for the F1 kayak, but decided to go with an ash foredeck stringer which I could make a bit lower profile and retain the same strength as the taller cedar one on my F1. There’s a subtle swoop to this that’s purely an aesthetic decision, and one I’ll probably regret because it’s accomplished by setting the second deck beam 3/8 of an inch lower which tightens the space for gear to slide in. Of course, this is a relative assessment and still far better than any other skin boat you’d actually want to paddle.
I let the end of the stringer slightly into the V of the gunwale end with a little bit of freehand work with the block plane. It looks neat and wasn’t hard to do.
I made a little block in the stern just in case I decide not to go with my normal loops through the gunwales and mount a piece of hardware back there or drill a hole for a drain plug. This probably isn’t a detail that I would include in a building course because I can just picture somebody cutting off their hand trying to make the little beveled hardwood block on a miter saw.
I’m pretty relaxed about frame finishing typically spending about five minutes with an angle grinder and a 30 grit wheel, and another 15 with a block plane a chisel and a quarter sheet of 120 grit sandpaper. In my experience you can spend two days or 20 minutes cleaning up a frame and it looks pretty much the same. I’ll leave the marathon sanding to the cedar strip guys.
I brush a liberal coat of Watco Danish Oil onto the frame, and then wipe it off with a towel. This has precisely zero effect on longevity on durability (at least with red cedar, white oak, and ash). But it does make things look shippy, which people seem to appreciate.
Pro Tip: always wipe down the top first and then the bottom because if you reverse this order you won’t catch the oil that drools out of the mortises, which can lead to much cursing when the coating fails to adhere to the oily spots that have printed into the skin.
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