Day 7, Skin on Frame River Touring kayak: coating the kayak.
All of our kayaks are coated with the Spirit Line two-part polyurethane. Having tried many other options there is nothing that I’ve found that is even half as tough. It is, however, not a very easy or forgiving product. Being the poor capitalist that I am, last year I pulled my entire coating process out of my paid video courses and put it on the internet for free because I just couldn’t stand seeing so many people just destroying their boats with this stuff.
Today I’m experimenting with some ideas to add extra durability to the bottom of the kayak. The first one was to laminate an extra patch of skin onto the bottom which if it had worked would have given me a perfect 18-ounce covering right where I needed it. I realized at the last possible moment that this wasn’t going to work and so with great effort I peeled it off and was able to smooth the coating down.
The next experiment was just building up a lot of layers of coating. This is something that we didn’t used to be able to do when we applied this with spreader cards but with the roller system things are a lot more controllable. As far as I can tell there’s no upper limit for how many coats you can put on, but I have run into the unexpected limitation of the masking on the deck not releasing cleanly after a certain amount of time. After the first few coats I apply the coats an hour apart which means that I can just barely get to five total coats before it’s impossible to peel the tape off without leaving a permanent small blue stripe around the entire perimeter.
Just like with the skinning there’s so many ways to ruin your kayak here. Things you wouldn’t even think of until you come out the next morning and find that the beautiful coating that you left the night before is now hazy or drippy or – the worst possible scenario – permanently sticky. Most of what I know about this is up for free on YouTube although I’m continually adding improvements in my online courses.
Using a heat gun on the coating has been a huge improvement, but I also had a massive disaster before I learned what not to do!
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