East Greenland Kayak Build, Day 5. Oiling the frame.
It’s always nice if I can get the oil on at the end of day 4, but with the short days of winter this time I had to wait an extra day.
Oiling the frame isn’t really necessary, but I suppose it does seal the wood up a bit. Mostly I just do it because it makes the frame look pretty.
The process here is one of those things that can take 30 minutes or two hours depending on how you do it. The way I approach it is to break it down into similar motions and use a ton of oil so it really soaks into the wood and creeps into all the crevices.
First I paint all the ribs, dipping the brush with each rib, then I do all the stringers, then the deck and the deck beams. After that I turn it over and do the bottom, which is mostly coated from the spill over at this point. After that I turn the boat upright and dry it off the deck, and then upside down and dry off the hull.
The sequence here is REALLY IMPORTANT because if you dry the bottom first and then turn it over to dry the top, the frame will seem dry but what you won’t notice is the little drips oil that drool out of the rib mortises and builds up on the stringer lashings overnight. It will still seem completely dry the next day until you really start to squeeze the skin on and then magically oil spots will bloom into the skin at the lashing locations. There’s no way to fix this and the coating won’t stick to the spots. So at that point it’s a new skin.
Simple stuff like this is huge part of what you get out of my online skin-on-frame building courses. It’s not rocket science but if you hadn’t already ruined a skin this way you just wouldn’t think of it.
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