Whoa dude- quoting the magic 3 coats on end grain (two on side grain) for epoxy coating- cool. Rot is greatly prevented because wood will not rot a) if at less than 20% water by weight and b) in the presence of O2. So dry wood or no O2 and voila, no rot. Wood boats in the Pharoh's tomb 3k years old had not rotten; no fiberglas boats found lol...
Hello. I was Just browsing and noticed this post. It is true that if you keep wood dry enough the fungi can't eat the wood 'cause it's just TOO dry [they can't make enough saliva to chew it up....]. Rot doesn't happen without oxygen, either....even if it's wet. Maybe ten years ago of my customers brought me a piece of 6-million-year-old fern-stem that was dug out of a mud bank [almost no oxygen down there] where the tourists go digging for fossil opal. There was still enough fiber left that it would hold its shape, although it had to be kept under water; allowed to dry out, it fell apart if handled. Just for the heck of it, I dried a piece *very carefully*, and gently dripped CPES onto it, and let that sit a week, and repeated the treatment twice more. I restored that piece of six-million-year-old wood enough that it had handling strength. True story.
Getting back to fungi and air and water, I have written about this from time to time, as it is something that anyone with wood in their lives needs to know. Word gets around; just recently a painter who had evidently read some of my materials put up a post about this in the Do-It-Yourself forum. Well, it's a pretty good summary of the care and feeding of fungi, and he got all his facts right, so I'll just put in a link to that post [but, not having fifteen posts, I can't post links, so I will sort-of spell it out]
It starts with the usual three w, and then diychatroom and then a dot com and /showthread.php?t=23401&highlight=fungi
The moral of all this is that water-intrusion and ventilation are the two things that should be looked at in any wood or GRP boat to keep it from going away. Water intrusion leads to rot in balsa-core structures: The water can't escape as vapor as easily as it enters as liquid [the ratio is 1200-to-one] and there's NO ventilation inside a balsa core. Without ventilation, the moisture content of wood with water exposure can esily rise to the 15-30% range that fungi love, and without ventilation in the interior of a GRP hull, you will have higher probability and severity of GRP osmotic-blistering.
Steve Smith
