i’m basically a hack builder and did not follow any of the exacting steps for staining and experimented as i went along. the results echo my building ability but are more due to the difficult shape and my glassing inabilities rather than the staining process.

my approach, fairly well borne out, was that as i wanted a darkish stain, and as the dye was water suspended that i could do pretty well do or redo whatever i wanted and still get an acceptable result.

so first bought some 1/8 ply and without doing anything started pouring on the stain. didn’t work too well as lots of microscopic bubbles caught in the grain/surface that the stain just couldn’t get to.
so wiped it all off and wet scrubbed the whole surface down with a stiff bristled fingernail brush in order to get all portions of the wood damp so that capilliary action would allow the stain to infiltrate everywhere. ( i had very thin veneered 1/8 ply so thats why the brush vs cross sanding or scuffing). wiped off all the wet spots, let it ‘dry’ to damp all over and brushed or scrubbed in the stain.
still had some microscopic bubble areas in later panels that i scrubbed into with some effect – i wish it had been the first panel so that i could have at least tried out gentle cross sanding to see if that would have worked better for infiltration.

to even out the stain in final application, i used full length overlapping brush strokes.

but i live in a rainy area, was working in the carport and twice came back to water droplets disfiguring the stain over parts of the panel. descriptive language doesn’t convery the vocal occurrences that seemed to be floating around at those TWO occasions! slow learner. but as it is water based, just restained it all over, i had gone as dark as it would get so no colour change, basically just moving water around.
then let dry and applied sealcoat the next day.

i figured to ‘scrape on’ a very faint seal in order to retain the wood ‘tooth’. i did this, but there are 2 drawbacks. the first being that scraping over the ‘rough’ surface disturbs the epoxy so much that it will foam and you have to go really slow and be careful of no foam buildup in areas. i don’t notice any seal foam in the 2 yaks now, but it sure was an issue in application. the second drawback on lt sealing is obviously it is easy to sand thru. panels were final glassed months after sealing.
this amt of sealing had no discernable effect on bending req'd. i think that even a thicker more traditional sealcoat would have minimal effect on bending.

in places on my boats, i intentionally kept multiple panels non flush with each other in order to articulate them. the drawback to this is that panel edges get sanded/scraped off real easy and restaining has to be carefully redone. this happend all over with me, but the now epoxy saturated lightly sanded/scraped off areas do not suck up the stain in the same way as before. care needs to be taken to match – worked for me some places, not in others.

the pic show prestained/presealed panels being bent and stitched in place. bending with thin sealing is not affected. as the edges often showed, you can see the stained edges of the panel being placed. when wires were pulled, all wire holes were post stained w/ a tiny sable brush dipped in stain and twirled.
you can see an obvious raised edge where one panel dives down - situations like this often had their edges inadvertently (drats!) filed, sanded or scraped off causing some restaining problems.
big separation in time betw this type of sealing and glassing did/does not seem to cause/allow delamination next to impacts, much abrasion and general thrashing.

with a simply shaped yak, with ordinary seayak use, with good ply - i would test out presanding, predamp the panels, use a heavier sealcoat(than a scrapecoat), possibly scuff it up before stitching (to eliminate edge sanding at panels), and/or make sure the panels are very evenly placed and stitched.

-mick