EPOXY SEALING TIMBER

I've always had a vague desire to own a boat. Generally the problem 
with them is that they're awkward to handle on your own, and I 
don't know people to go places with. All such concerns can however 
be dismissed in the face of an irresistably low price tag, so when 
I recently discovered a small old wooden boat for $400 at an 
unlikely sort of second-hand store (an abandoned brewery full of 
industrial equipment, building salvage, old cars, and excessive 
numbers of rusty 60s/70s era busses) it made me think a little more 
seriously.

Of course the small price was for a big reason - clearly the thing 
was rotten and probably beyond the point of practical conventional 
restoration for something of its type. Later on though, I started 
thinking about the core issue with the rot, and how if it could be 
halted before the structual integrity was compromised, the problem 
would be solved. My idea was to simply seal the whole thing up in 
exoxy, so moisture could no longer get in to extend the rot, and 
seal up any leaks in the hull at the same time.

Back home I did a bit of web searching, and after a few promising 
leads regarding nautical uses of epoxies in constructing new boats, 
I eventually came across this old Usenet thread from one of the 
countless newsgroups that unfortunately died long before I became 
interested in their topic:

"Epoxy fix for old wooden boat"
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.boats.building/c/EVv5gcN8Oi4
(unfortunately Google have the only Usenet archive that goes back 
this far, much as I hate to link to them)

The general consensus is that because the wood is sealed, any spot 
that you miss, or gets damaged, with the epoxy will allow water 
into a space where it can sit and rot the timber away even faster 
than normal. In practice then, it's not really practical, because 
you're always going to get a chip or crack in the epoxy somewhere 
before long if the boat is in use.

So I haven't laid down my $400, which might be for the best anyway. 
But the idea has still been turning around in my head. What might 
work is if you can get an epoxy to actually penetrate the timber. 
What if you had an epoxy that actually flowed through the wood like 
sap does in a tree? When it hardens, it would form complex patterns 
of sealed sections within the timber structure, so that even as one 
part exposed to moisture might rot away, it would be segmented into 
such a small layer by the sections of epoxy that it wouldn't make 
much difference. You would effectively have multiple shells of 
epoxy within the wood, and even as outer shells are penetrated and 
rot, they continue to add a layer of protection for the inner 
shells within the wood/epoxy structure. It would in effect be 
invulnerable to the extensive spread of rot seen in a 'single 
shell' epoxy-sealed hull.

This sort of epoxy sealed timber could be extremely useful both in 
restoration, and maybe even as a building material in its own 
right. But I don't know whether such a thing actually exists. The 
epoxy needs to actually eat away at the wood, penetrating through 
the softer parts of its internal structure, so I guess it needs a 
corrosive quality to it, which must then be neutralised once it 
hardens. Unfortunately chemistry is one area of science in which I 
have praticularly little understanding. So short of finding an 
existing product that can achieve this, it's difficult to tell 
whether it's even theoretically possible.

 - The Free Thinker, 2022