Greetings all!
Long-time lurker, first-time poster here.
My father has passed-along to me the kayak he built about 30 years ago. She is called the Screeching Loon. She is built of wood, mahogany he tells me, and fiberglass. He had some canoe building experience, having built a racing canoe a few years prior. It’s a bit of a unique boat, she is 17’ 5" long, 24" wide, just over 8" wide, with a V-shape at the bow and stern, flat in the middle, being flattest and widest just behind the paddling station. It served us well on a few boundary water trips, later used as a stealthy duck-hunting boat, but it has mostly sat unused for the past 20 years. I plan to refurbish it and use it for fishing and exploring on our local 3,000-10,000 acre lakes.
It’s hard to know where to start with this project, but it seems getting it sea-worthy again is the first priority. It has 3 cracks that I think I need to repair. The worst is at the stern, the wood underneath is soft, and water was leaking out of the area when I put it on my roof rack, nearly a week after it had been in the water. One crack near the bow and another under the paddle station don’t look awful, but looks like I should fix them sooner than later.
What is the best way to effect these repairs? I assume I can get a fiberglass and epoxy kit from my local paddle shop?
Can I just use polyurethane to seal up areas where the previous coating has been worn off, exposing the wood?
I will likely decide to sand the whole thing down and resurface it over the winter. But for now I’d just like to get it out on the water again and figure out how I like to use it before I consider more substantial refurbishing and modification.
I can’t offer you the wood repair advice you will probably get from folks on here with more experience, but I can tell you that just polyurethane on damaged wood will NOT protect or preserve it with exterior exposure and immersion.
Update: I found another soft spot on the underside of the stern, not far from the soft spot on the side there. Is it time to seek professional repair or cover it with fiberglass and just hope for the best?
Some power sanding is in order. Fill any voids or cracks with marine epoxy mixed with wood dust. Then glass over the repairs with thin weave fiberglass cloth and marine epoxy. Fill the weave with more epoxy. Then varnish for UV protection.
Might make sense to treat cracks and voids in and around soft areas with wood hardener before filling. Doing so may give the epoxy filler more structural support and help the bond resist failure as the boat flexes during use.
My plan is to dig out the rest of the rotten wood, apply wood hardener as recommended, and then pour some epoxy into the void. Adding wood dust to the epoxy is a good tip, thank you ppine. Then I’ll cover up with at-least 2 layers of fiberglass since this area obviously gets beat-up.
I know the right thing to do is to replace the wood strips, but I don’t have the skills for that, and I don’t think what I’m planning to do will prevent a more-extensive repair in the future.
I’m going to need more fiberglass. I got a Northstar branded Composite repair kit from my local paddle shop. However, it was $65 and the amount of fiberglass you get is pretty small, I think I would need a second kit to address this mess and the other smaller cracks on the boat. Searching the internet I am seeing fiberglass repair kits with larger sheets for half the price at auto parts stores and fiberglass repair kits for boats at hardware stores and marine stores for half the price (but maybe less material). Is there any reason not to use these?
As the void gets bigger, you might consider cutting some wood and glassing that into hole. It doesn’t have to be an exact fit, but using wood thickened epoxy to fill a small gap between two pieces of wood and then glassing is a stronger fix than trying to bridge a 3 or 4” void. As you said, that’s a point of hard use you’re trying to fix.
For the record, I don’t have any affiliation with CLC other than they are a 2 hour drive away. When I was struggling with the documentation that came with the Pygmy kit, they were always happy to help out, generous to a fault with advice and have very cool tools and materials that improved my build.
