: I have a wood paddle that has a crack in the blade and I would like to repair
: it with epoxy and glass.

It would be hard to get all the oil out of the wood. Maybe you might get some to come out if you saturated it with boiling water, or got a big pot and boiled the blade, but that could create bigger problems than you already heave. So don't expect any glass to stick should you apply it to the face of the blade as a potential bandage.

I'd start by trying to fix it without using glass. Mix a small amount of resin and paint over the crack. It should soak in. Hopefully the crack will have opened up wood which is deep enough that it has not been saturated by the oil treatment. Your epoxy should stick nicely to that newly exposed wood, and hopefully it will prevent the crack from spreading.

Another thought is to let the thing go without being repaired, at least for a few years. I've had varnished canoe paddles with splits in them for years. They look old and ugly, but they still work. If the split ever gets so big that the blade comes apart, I'll use resin and glass to hold the parts together--but that will probably still be many more years down the road. Your paddle may last a good long time without any intervention on your part. If you quit oiling the blade, in a few years of use enough oil may leach out, or polymerize, so that future repairs will stick nicely.

Another thought is to coat the blade with a sealer which can contain the oils, yet provide a sufficiently strong base which the epoxy can bond to. I've used lacquers for sealing oil paints, and artists have used varnishes for centuries. But those old varnishes can take years to get hard enough for your needs. If you have some oil-based polyurethane varnish you might try that. Allow something like Varathane to dry for a couple of weeks and it has an armor-hard finish. That's why it is used for floors. Lacquer would dry faster, and shellac would possibly work as well. There are probably a few other sealers you can find at your local paint store. They may have local trade names, but check the labels and you will probably find they are based on either a urethane, polyurethane, lacquer or shellac base. Whatever you use, once it is hard you can roughen the surface by sanding with a coarse sandpaper, and apply glass and resin over the surface of the blade.

But leave that as a future idea. it is probably not worth the cost of buying a can of any of them for this small of a project. You may be using some of these sealers for other projects in the years to come, and you can use a few drops of whatever is left over to experiment with.

Hope one of these ideas helps. Good luck with your repairs.

PGJ