After some last minute shenanigans which I’ll talk about tomorrow, I cleaned up the kayak frame and drenched it in oil.
Breaking any rough or sharp edges takes about 30 minutes with hand tools, although for my own boats I do it in 10 with an angle grinder with a 30 grit wheel, and a palm sander with a single sheet of 120 grit.
You could spend the rest of your life sanding one of these frames it into a piece of sculpture, but I just don’t see the point when the whole thing is getting covered with a skin.
The oil I’m using here is Corey’s Boat Sauce, which is a variation on the classic pine tar recipe that substitutes tung oil for linseed oil and limonene for turpentine. Personally, it’s a little too thick for my taste and I doubt that it’s penetrating into all the cracks but I happen to have it here so I just decided to use it.
Generally I’m just slapping on some Watco Danish oil, which is a lot thinner and a lot more toxic, but still has a decent amount of solids in it. This has been my go to for most of my skin boat career just because it dries fast enough that I can skin the next day.
More important than what you put on the boat is the sequence you apply it. You want to oil everything you can see from the top, then flip it over and oil everything you can see from the bottom, then flip it back over and wipe off everything you can see from the top, and flip it over and wipe off everything you can see from the bottom.
What happens if you start oiling on the bottom and finish wiping on the top is that the oil that was trapped in the mortises can drool down the rib and soak into the lashings after you walk away. Then, in then morning when you come back, the frame feels dry, you go to put the skin on and everything seems fine, and then halfway through stitching up the skin all these little oil spots from the oil that soaked into the lashings start to bloom all over the bottom of the kayak. At that point it’s a total loss, and you have to replace the skin.
Truthfully, I don’t think oil does anything to extend the life of a skinboat, but it looks pretty, and that’s mostly why I do it.
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