Pre staining the cockpit recess so it will match the rest of the boat.
so 3:30 in the afternoon and I'm just now getting into the shop I've spent all day preparing for something I'm really excited about my scoot Exede kayak retreat with my friend Jerry we're going to be going up to Winter Harbor Maine in September to the scooted point which is part of Acadia National Park and there's a great facility up there the Scottish Institute which is right out at the end of scooted point where we're gonna stay there and do kayaking around the islands in frenchmen Bay and around scooted point and I think it's gonna be a lot of fun I'm gonna take a bunch of my wooden kayaks up there let people try them out try them and the conditions are really designed for and give people a chance to see what a lightweight rugged sea kayak made out of wood really does out in those conditions thinks it's gonna be a lot of fun so if you're interested in that I've got another video it just posted earlier today but today I want to do a little bit with the staining of those parts that cut out yesterday the coaming recessed parts so I'm gonna do a quick discussion about the stain and see if I can get a little bit of stain on those parts and make those ready for the next step which will be assembling the recess and maybe a little bit of fiberglass thing I'm still trying to figure out things like accent strips where they ain't going to install those on the recessed etc but for now let's just take a little bit of look at the stain these are the parts I cut out yesterday that constitute the coaming recess like I said here's the sill and this will be the part that brings the recess down wraps around like that this same idea wraps around from the back side like so but the first thing I want to do is just sort of clean up some of the edges the router bit didn't cut all the way through and so I've got some little hairy edges down here where there's a little bit of excess fuzz and so I'm just gonna take and turn that flash off of there and some of the tabs that were holding the material through the rest of the plywood
doesn't need to be cleaned up perfectly it's all going to get a major sanding at some point farther along in the process we want to get rid of some of the hair Y edges so I've just got some sandpaper on various blocks here to clean this up on this I did make a little tab right here on the end this marks the center in the back of the coaming or the recess and I don't want to remove that because that will help me line up this piece which has a little notch in that same location so when it comes time to put these together I can just line those up and make sure everything lines up well I did make an effort when I was cutting these out to cut them out in the same piece of plywood in the same general orientation that they're going to be in in the finished boat so the green pattern here runs across from one piece to the next as this wraps around that falls down a little bit but at least as close as it can be when I'm sanding the face here I'm sanding with the grain and this is pretty fine sandpaper to 120 or 220 because I don't want to create cross-grain scratches in this wood because the stain is going to highlight any of that when I'm sanding the face of this I'm using a coarser grit and I'm not hitting the corner here I'm not trying to round this corner off I want to make surface nice and flat and I'm not trying to change the shape any other than just getting rid of any of the CNC tabs that might be remaining and usually between this sort of vertical sanding the edge and this horizontal sanding of the edge you can get rid of most of that roughness and it'll look pretty good so once that's all cleaned up I'm gonna want to stain everything the reason I'm staining this is because the client saw one of my other boats and he liked the looks of it he liked the color of it and thought that looked pretty cool and so he wants something that has a similar look to what he saw on my website that's my intention to give the client what he wants but there's a few advantage to sustaining the wood it can be really hard to find high-quality western red cedar now with good color so putting some stain on it is one way to enhance that color you know so it takes a boring piece of wood and makes it a much more interesting I've done that a lot with a Kume plywood stitch and glue boats and I think it's a great way to take something that's might be a little bit drab or boring and punch it up a bit and so the stains an excellent way to do that you can't use just any stain your typical oil-based furniture stain like a Minwax or something like that can interfere with the epoxy bond when you go to do the fiberglass that oils in between the wood and your epoxy and can that can weaken the bond and actually there can be chemical interactions between the epoxy and that oil if things aren't going quite right we want to avoid that so I use an alcohol-based stain this material I've found works really well is this balance product it's their beylin solar luck stain you can get this in a variety of outlets just speak like craft who sells kits from my designs as this and the variety colors works really well the solar Lux refers to the fact that it doesn't fade quickly in the Sun there's some really nice-looking stains that are excellent stains but are really meant for indoor furniture where if they're in the Sun they're not colorfast and the stain will fade away very quickly and so this is intended to be out in the Sun or useful for being out in the Sun it's not to say that this stain will not fade I've had some boats where I stored him on the roof of my car for years at a time and you know after eight years the stain was pretty sad looking but this stuff does work and I've been really happy with it I've got it on boats that are you know 15-20 years old now and they still look great decision right now is to figure out what color to go with and I need to figure out a couple different things with that the color of the body of the boat the you know the clients had you know saw a picture that he liked and you know so my first inclination is to just go with the color that's going to match what he saw on that web page and that was in one of these medium red mahogany sort of colors something like that I I tend to like those colors something about the red I just find I like it's you know it's this is all personal preference so what you like and what I like may be different but he seemed to like a boat that had something along those lines what the question becomes you know if I go with that and there's a variety of sort of the mahogany's here that are gonna look good there's a medium red mahogany light red mahogany this is cordovan mahogany there's also blood red and some other things that have a little bit of a reddish hue to them since I'm putting the Akuma in the cockatrice cockpit recess area it's an opportunity add a little bit of contrast you know I've got the accent stripes running down the center line and different places on feature lines and so those subtle little accents can really give the whole look of the boat a little bit more depth and so similarly while I'm having a different wood here with the Baku mate maybe I might want to stain that a little bit differently you know putting all the same color stain on everything will tend to blend it together even though I've got western red cedar here which is substantially darker than the natural color of this Akuma I put some stain on it and they're gonna tend to merge together a little bit the lightest color will still be lighter the darker material will still be darker but they're gonna tend to look fairly similar and maybe that's good maybe that's bad you know I I haven't decided right now I'm still thinking about it and part of my thinking about it will happen right here so this is just some samples of the material used on the boat so I have those I have some samples of the Akuma here which I can use and spread some staining on and then just you know look at them side by side think is that the look I'm going for one thing to keep in mind you see with these samples here I have my samples on some stuff that was naturally a little bit darker than the Akuma right here you see the natural color but not completely different but then this right at this line I've got one coat of epoxy on it right in here I've got just fiberglass so on top of the epoxy I've got five of glass with the coat of epoxy on it and then I have put a fill coat on top of that we've so you can see it changes its characteristics depending on what's on top of it so so the richest is where you've got the most material on top of it and where it's dry it tends to not be as saturated in color you know the difference between here and here is just a coat of epoxy where this looks a whole lot darker than that does so if it's a little bit hard to envision what the finished book is gonna look like based just on the color you see in your samples I tend to want to look at the samples when they're first wet because that's going to be the closest to this wet out and you see the difference between this and and this up here is substantially less than the difference between this and that that's just the presence of one seal coat of epoxy on top of that stain if we're looking at something like the the medium red mahogany or potentially the cordovan mahogany here the medium red tends to be a little bit darker and there's a little bit of a purple hue to the cordovan mahogany it looks a little bit less natural than the medium red or the light red you know i'm thinking with the dark colors we have here that for the cedar that it's not going to really need to go for the full dark you know I've got some nice grain and here in the darker stain I put on here the less that grain is going to show so going with something a little lighter to give it a bit of a hue that's different from its natural hue but still get more of that natural variation in color due to the grain I think might work well like using this material here so the light red mahogany so that's what we have in this bottle here I've got things like cherry here I was thinking it was possible that like doing the body of the boat in a medium red mahogany and then the Kume in cherry might look pretty good might just give it some contrast there so I'm just gonna wet out some samples with stain and take a look at them see what I think but I've got some medium red mahogany here here's my knight red mahogany this is really hard to read I drove in mahogany the blood-red I believe Jerry Van Dyke Brown so I'm gonna put some of these colors on the cedar to see what it looks like on there and other colors on the Akuma to see what it looks like on there and then I can bring those two next to each other and see how they look going together got a box of gloves this stain is very good stain you get it on your hands it won't come off until your skin falls off I also have some what they're calling rags here you know paper cloth white rags these are paper towels but they're somewhat decent I wouldn't stain the whole boat with this material but for just doing this these samples it's not such a bad way to go and a pencil so I can say okay this is the light red all right so that's what the light red mahogany will look like this is cordovan
maybe I should put some of this on here as well the folly stains you can make them darker with extra coats once one coat dry put another coat on and you'll get a deeper color the easiest thing to do would be to do the who may end the cedar the same color but just want to explore my options and see if doing them in different colors might look cool so this is a cordovan a slight red light red medium red medium red and this cordovan with cordovan I'm also thinking that like a cherry with one of those might look good so keeping this a lighter color keeping the Kume a lighter color than the cedar might look sharp in this light the color of these looks all very much the same you know just put some of this on here and she and then this Van Dyck Brown I think is a darker Brown this would be having the Akoo maybe lighter in color the other option is to go with the the cuvette being darker in color get the contrast that way I do have a jet black from this Bale in solo walks that could look really sharp to having the coaming be in a jet black I think to my eye that so can be a little bit much
so again these colors as they dry they all start to look a little bit lighter and noticing in the video screen there they look a little bit darker than they appear in real life so light red mahogany cherry cordovan and medium red mahogany so that's everything side by side is the same color in this light the cordovan looks very purple and looks frankly weird you take that and you put a little bit of epoxy over it in v glass and that mutes that purple sort of fades a bit but I I'm thinking that looks a little bit too weird for me so I'm gonna put that on the side this light red mahogany I think that looks pretty sharp on the cedar it does less to hide the actual grain I'm wondering if that next to something else would be good or if I'm just better off going with light red on the Akuma - I think they may be happiest with something like that no the other option is to go for a real contrast and not put any stain at all on the khoomei and so the whole thing's quite bright and I'm not really happy with that idea I think having some stain on it give it a little bit more color the Akuma over time yellows a little bit and so having a color over it I think gives it a little bit better long-term look to it so you know do I go with something that adds a little bit of color but not a whole lot like this cherry or something that's going to be in the same tonal family as the rest of the boat with the light red mahogany overall I think that's sort of where I'm leaning right now something like that so that's that's my thoughts on that I think my sense right now is light red mahogany on the strips light red mahogany on the cumin I think that'll look sharp and again the color of this versus what it ends up with once it's got some epoxy on it it's redder in this than it is in this sample but again everything deepens substantially with the epoxy and fiberglass on it so I'm thinking that could look quite nice so being the color family that the customer saw I think we'll get some contrast between the recess area and the body of the boat which will look sharp and so that's what I'm going with so I'll finish up the cleanup of these parts all right now I'm ready to put some stain on these I think these pieces are small enough that I can use these white rags with this alcohol-based stain it dries very very quickly so you want to put it on really wet and you will not have the opportunity to wipe it off that you have with standard oil based stains so oil based stains you wipe on let it sit for a little while and then wipe it off here we're just going to put it on and try and put it on fairly wet and that'll be here I'm gonna stain both sides while I'm at it one will be on the inside nobody will ever see it all right so one piece down see this rag is getting all chewed out really quickly so I don't recommend these for not sustained I have you know t-shirts and so forth that do a better job but for this is good enough
so I often get the question with this stain can I apply the stain to the strips before stripping up the boat and the answer is no the stain is on very very thin it you know it soaks into the grain but still you know if I were to say in one of these pieces I'd be through the stain almost immediately even with very fine sandpaper so basically I add the stain as the last thing before applying epoxy but I feel a lot to do with the coaming recessed between now and the time I'm ready to apply epoxy so I'm gonna seal the stain under a thin coat of epoxy just roll some on those parts so as I work on them later on I don't immediately damage that stain I might have to touch things up here and there but this way it will be under the protective coating of epoxy and that should make sure I don't mess up the epoxy right away so I've mixed this epoxy up like normal I'm not going to go into how them deal with epoxy right now that is a big subject in this one I will talk about and do course so I've got a little roller tray here a little hot dog roller just gonna roll on the coat of epoxy here and you'll see the hot dog roller picks up a little stain the stains still very fresh as the stain has a chance to set it will become well bonded to the material and so it won't bleed with the coating of more epoxy but at this point it's still very very fresh it's picked up by the roller pretty easily so I'm not putting on a thick belt here it's pretty thin it's enough to sort of protect that layer of stained make it so it won't be quite so delicate one advantage of doing the epoxy coating is still a little bit runny is we'll even out the coating of stain so if this sort of light and dark spots it will tend to even those out and unify it a little bit this is already looking better
so the next episode I'm gonna put the coaming recess together I talked a little bit about maybe putting an accent around the coaming lip itself I will think about that some more and maybe I'll do that I will start cutting the hole in the deck I think I can probably handle that next episode and we'll just see how far we get I'm never quite certain it depends on what interruptions I have once again if you have any questions please post them in the comments if you liked this video and enjoyed and learn something please give me a thumbs up if you are enjoying this whole series and finding it interesting hit subscribe turn on notifications whatever it takes so you notified about each new episode I'm trying to post something new every day during the weekdays I'm sure I'll miss some but at this point I've been holding do that pretty well what time I posted berries because I'm often in the shop when I think is probably the best time to posted I try and post it around lunchtime around noon but sometimes it's later sometimes it's earlier so until the next episode thanks for watching and happy paddling
