Skin on Frame Canoe Time Lapse 11
The coating I use on all of my boats is the two-part polyurethane sold by skinboats.org. I’ve written about this extensively in previous posts so I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but basically I like this stuff because it’s relatively tough, non-toxic, inexpensive, and easy to apply. Downsides are a lack of UV resistance and that it’s not recoatable.
With reasonable care I can usually get about 5000 miles out of a boat before it needs a reskin. It goes on wet on wet and takes about five hours from start to finish and that’s literally all you have to do for the life of the skin, which is about as close to a miracle as exists in boat building.
Just like every marine finish there’s a lot of ways to screw this up and end up with a disaster, but I’m pretty obsessive about covering all that in my course materials so most of my students have good results these days.
Here’s the numbers for this part of the build, and if you’re not sick of that song already hit that sound button.
Task times in minutes:
15 Masking the gunwales
15 setting up for coating
20 mix and apply first batch
15 mix and apply second batch
20 mix and apply third batch
5 smoothing imperfections
20 mix and apply fourth batch
5 smoothing imperfections
20 mix and apply fifth batch
10 smoothing imperfections + armoring the ends and keel with thicker, partially cured material.
Task time: 2 hr 25 min
Total build time so far 37 hrs 45 min
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