Gunwale oiling; how far to go?

It’s like anything else.
If you dwell on it for too long, you’ll start to lose perspective.



What’s the baseline? Ash gunnels on your average canoe stored in a garage and re-oiled when needed will last how long, 30 years?



A competent professional re-rail costs what, 300-400 bucks?

depends on how you store the boat
Oil, varnish, or polyurethane finish on gunwales is more than cosmetic. Ash has a pretty open grain and bare ash will over time soak up moisture, split, turn gray, and eventually rot without it. But if you store your boat in a protected area and especially if you dry up any trapped water before storing it, that deterioration could take a very long time.



When neglected gunwales rot, it usually starts at the stems on the undersides of the deck plates and inwales, and where the machine screws securing thwarts and seat trusses penetrate the inwales. The thwart ends can rot too because moisture tends to be trapped between the thwarts and inwales for some time after use and the hole the machine screw goes through transmits the moisture into the wood.



I like to remove the thwarts and seat(s) at least some of the time I oil the rails. It lets you inspect the thwart ends and oil them (if not varnished) and get some oil into the holes. It also makes it easier to oil the inwales without getting a gunky mess or oil on the inside of the hull. If you do this enough, the oil residue inside the holes in the thwarts and seat hangers may make it difficult to get the machine screws through so you might want to enlarge them very slightly with a drill or rat tail file.



I have taken the rails off some old boats with weathered wood to inspect the hidden sides of the inwales and outwales. I found them to be pretty weathered but far from rotted. These days if I do that I will sand the inner aspects of the outwales and outer aspects of the inwales and seal them with epoxy rather than oiling that face, as I think it is more durable.

I guess it depends who does it…
I went to a freestyle symposium a few years ago and talked (as well as showed him my boat, a Magic(Bell) and he wanted close to $600 to regunnel it at the time… He’s an extremely competent woodworker as he makes and sells MANY paddles and, of which I purchased one, but I couldn’t justify the expense. I bought the canoe and a beautiful Nashwaak cherry paddle for $800, thanks to a former poster(NT)'s tip. the previous owner had drilled some holes in the gunnels that had started to rot and I thought I might just bring the boat back to original condition, but decided the next owner could have that chance…You know, the Magic is a great design, but I haven’t even paddled it in a couple years…I’ve sortof moved on to daytrippers and it sits unused…




OK, maybe I lowballed it a little.
But you’re right, there are varying levels of both competence and professionalism.



I wonder what openboater scharges for a basic re-rail these days?

$450-600 average price (nm)

Looks like two choices
Digesting what all of you have written, my conclusion is the SRT needs to be stored out of the weather. Practically speaking, that means inside my house, since I don’t have any outbuildings.



I keep my boats in a set of racks under the deck. They are out of the sun, but they still get wet when it rains.



There’s some slings in the garage left over from when I was storing the Wontonah (20 ft wood canoe), and I could hang the SRT in those. But, compared to going to the rack and sliding the boat out and onto your shoulders, it is a pain in the neck. It only takes five or ten minutes, but…



Plus I use those slings when I want to take my truck cap off (a whole one time in the last year). But that’s the only way I can raise and lower the cap by myself.



I am officially in dither mode on what to do, or “admiring the problem,” as a friend likes to say. Seems my choices are find indoor storage I can live with or get rid of the boat.



~~Chip

How about this idea?
I don’t know if this idea fits with your notion of aesthetics (or perhaps more important, those of your spouse), but at the cabin where my dad and his wife lived the last 15 years or so, he put interlocking sheets of metal roofing right under the deck. They were slightly sloped so rain that came through the deck ran off to one side, just like with a “real roof”. You can’t see it from above, but from underneath it definitely looks like a hillbilly solution to a storage problem. It’s very cheap, easy and effective though.

Well, Chip
I kept my Vermont Tupper in the living room for a year, and that was a real PITA. Now I keep it in a Public Storage unit across the highway along with my other toys, and that’s a lot better.



It also has wood trim. I neglect it terribly, enjoy it immensely, and when it is finally worn out or rotten, I will either take it back to Rob and let him make it like new, or I will sell it cheap to someone who likes to restore abused canoes and they will, I’m sure, speak harshly of the way I treated it ;^)



Life is too short to be a slave to canoe maintenance, although I’m told there are those who actually enjoy that sort of thing.

Impractical
is the word for wooden gunwales on boats that have to be stored outside. No matter what you do, they’re gonna rot over time - you can slow the process, but ya can’t stop it. I do wish that the makers of the high-end canoes that most of eventually end up with would offer aluminum gunwales.



Peter

Still seems fair, though I think
I either screwed myself on the hourly rate or gave myself a steep discount!

I thought of that, too.
Although I was thinking of the 2x8 sheets of corrugated plastic. It’s sort of complicated though. I’d need to lower the racks a bit, install some structure to hold up the “roof”, do something about routing water that would fall in one place instead of spread around. Much easier to just bring the boat in and find a place to hang it. It’s a choose your evil kind of choice.



~~Chip

Prior boat with wood gunwales
I’m with you, Sissy. I enjoy working on boats, but really, I’d rather play in them than work on them.



I had a Chipewan that I restored, including replacing the wood gunwales that had mostly rotted off. I enjoyed using the boat for a year or two, but the last time I finished oiling the gunwales on it, I thought, “this is for the birds,” came inside, and listed the boat on Craigslist. I vowed “no more wood gunwales.”



Time has a way of eroding my resolve, and then this SRT came along.



~~Chip

Shame, shame, shame
Chip, you admit you have a garage. I’m reading into this discussion that you actually put vehicles in your garage instead of stocking it full of boats on racks.



You gotta get serious about this hobby, man.



I dislike taking care of wooden rails, and many of mine have rotted under my back deck. I do love the slotted inwales on my SRT, both aesthetically and functionally. I scrub wash them once a year and oil twice. It’s an unpleasant chore. The garage gets the SRT, Caper, Wildfire, Huki and what looks like the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.


Trim Construction and Maintenance

– Last Updated: Dec-01-12 12:24 PM EST –

My initial reaction to maintenance issues is always: Ugh! Seems like a waste of time, but maybe a process we need embrace in the path of life?

Aluminum trim, with aluminum thwarts, seat bars under plastic seats. etc is one solution: Done when purchased, with occasional cracked seat replacement and the construction issues of usually flattened shear/rocker, poor capture of the hull's top compromising hull strength, rattling, and poor hand feel, with wide temperature swings. It'll do fine under a tarp on sawhorses in the yard, if not under an eve or Hemlock likely to dump an avalanche on it. Oh, aluminum rails with wood thwarts/ seats? See below.

Wood can be slowly bent from center to miinimize shear flattening, is usually much kinder to both eye and hand, but it requires maintenance; oil or varnish/PolyU application to all surfaces including joinery, open ends and machine screw bores.

Oil is easy, but requires several repetitions a year, preferably sanded out to 400/600 grit and needs seats and thwarts be removed to dunk open/crosscut ends a couple times a year. The surfaces where decks join rail and rails meet hull are problematic.

PolyUrethane if properly applied to every edge, replaces 6X annual maintenance with a significant, once every third to half decade event; disassemble, sand, three coats sanding between, reassemble. Unless the decks and rails come off too, we still have the long term rot issue where joinery holds moisture.

Find Mike McCrea's treatis on wood protection from a couple years back, best info to date. MinWax. who'd a thunk?

Inside, dry storage is pretty universally needed for wood trimmed hulls, and in the North, that isn't enough to stop cold cracking for rubber hulls, and in the deep, Republican, South, excess humidity causes rot anyway.

My personal preference runs to integral synthetic rails with synthetic trim because I can always find something more fun to do than service a tool I acquired to service me. It's probably, yet another, personality flaw and while synthetics can be artistically interesting they'll never rival wood for natural beauty.






1 Like

Mike’s wood finish thread…
…sadly, I believe, evaporated in the death of Solotripping.com.

Oh, I’ll bet
Mike still has the data. This might even be a good time to…

What…apply oil?
many of us former solotrippers are back online at canoetripping.net. Mike is there too.



But the archival stuff on solotripping is hard to find.



Oh yes oil. Paul of Colden Canoe taught me to apply oil and work it in with a Dobie pad. Often. Seems the heat helps penetration a little.

Postscript & Thanks
Thanks to all responders for the info provided.



A postscript is that since I posted this a few weeks back, the SRT has not been out of the shop. I’ve been out paddling, but have just been grabbing my Wenonah off the rack because it was several steps closer than the SRT and easier to grab the Wenonah than maneuver the SRT out of the workshop. The SRT was in the way in the shop. I ended up hoisting it out of the way, to the ceiling, making it even more trouble to get down and use. I am now realizing I need to build a rack in the garage. I know this is a crazy misprioritization, but I think I can put a rack up and to the side so that the garage can still store vehicles (gasp!). So, building a rack has been added to the to-do list, but it is pretty far down the list. Meanwhile, the SRT will sadly stay in the shop.



A story, related to GBG’s point on screw holes. Among my limited experience with wood gunwales, is a tale of a MR Fantasy. It belonged to a friend who moved to the area and had nowhere to store it. She ended up leaving it on the ground behind a sympathetic canoeist’s house, for a year or two. I volunteered to help her get it back in shape. She brought it over and the gunwales LOOKED solid, but weather beaten. We decided to remove the gunwales for treatment. As we were sanding, one of them snapped in her hand. Naturally, it was the fourth of the four gunwales to be sanded! Argh! Close inspection revealed the screw hole at the point of rupture had little cracks running out from the hole on the inner side. At that point, the wood inside the gunwale was powder. I believe if it had been GBG’s boat, and had irregularly received a squirt of oil into the screw hole, that would have prevented the wood rot. Also, it would have been preveted by PB’s and CEW’s periodic, complete removal and retreatment of wood boat parts.



The SRT wood was grey and weathered under the decks in the stems. Several pointed out this is a problem area. I taped a handle on a paint brush to liberally apply oil to that area, but short of complete removal, I won’t know how effective that was. I think it helps that the SRT has slots in the area where the deck joins the inwales, since that promotes drying and limits trapped water.



Thanks again to all who posted. I appreciate you taking the time to help me out.



~~Chip

Ash
Unprotected ash is simply not very rot resistant when exposed to the elements. It has a relatively open grain that soaks up moisture. Repeated exposure to damp opens the grain more and eventually the wood splits. The ends of outwales, where the end grain is exposed, is particularly prone to this process, and obviously, any hold drilled into the wood is a point for water entry into the heart of the wood.



Scuppered deck plates and inwales do help promote drainage some. It goes against the grain a bit, but it is a good idea to drill a 1/4" hold right where the tips of the inwales join together at boat stems, as close to the molded hole as possible to allow drainage of trapped water since this is the lowest point when the canoe is inverted.



I am going to have to rerail an old boat I just bought and will probably use ash. Since this is basically a flat water boat, I might go ahead and use a more durable treatment than penetrating oil to avoid some maintenance work in the future. I am thinking about applying several coats of System Three clear coat epoxy (very low viscosity with allegedly good wood penetrating power) and then covering it with varnish or polyurethane. I have generally preferred oil finishes on the gunwales of my boats, because the way I use them they tend to get scratched, so this would be something different.

I’m sure he does too
Mike just recently got a digital camera, so his wood test photo’s are probably actually print photo’s that he has squirelled away somewhere. I think he originally had the photo’s posted on webshot’s, which is now gone as well.



Minwax…amazing