Wooden Driftboat Refinishing Project

It’s that time again.  Time to maintain the wooden driftboat.  A well maintained wooden boat will last forever but a poorly kept one will be garbage after about 20 years.  If that wasn’t motivation enough, Matt’s brother just moved here from New York and my brother will be making a visit shortly and I want them to be impressed . . . a man version of Shelly frantically cleaning up the house before company arrives.

I started by removing the anchor brackets, flyline deck, floorboards and seats.  The next step was to scrub the boat clean inside and out:

If you look closely you can see some exposed areas that needed refinishing.  Less obvious are the places where the sides are checking, developing hairline fractures along the grain of the wood.  This is a particular weakness of Douglas fir plywood.  For this reason many people have switched over to Sapelle or Okoume plywood for boat building.  Those african woods do not check but from what I hear, Sapelle can be hard to work with and Okoume is more susceptible to rot.   I favor the fir but for no better reason than that an Oregon invention (driftboat) built and floated in Oregon should be made of wood grown in Oregon.   Anyway, next I sanded her inside and out:

The plan was to let her sit in the sun and make sure any exposed areas had an ample chance to dry out but a driving rain delayed the project by a couple days.  By that time the boat had a bunch of fir needles in the bottom and I removed those with a leaf blower.

After restaining any exposed areas that were previously stained I’ve made substantial progress refinishing the boat with Minwax Helsman spar urethane.  Now, this is what I’ve always used and I know some say that Marine grade urethane is the only way to go . . . but others say you pay an extra fifty bucks for the manufacturer to put the word “Marine” on the can.

I suppose I’m in the latter camp.