You oil a teak bench. You wipe it on the way you've wiped oil on a hundred other things, wipe off the excess, and leave it overnight expecting it to start setting up. The next morning it's still wet. Tacky. Smells like the can. So you tell yourself you went on too heavy, wipe it down again, and give it a week. A week later it's the same dead, sticky surface it was the morning after.
This is the one finishing failure where doing everything right is what produces the failure. You can lose a project and a weekend to it before it occurs to you that the problem isn't the oil and isn't your technique. It's the wood. The teak is poisoning the finish, and no amount of waiting fixes a poisoning.
Here's what's actually happening. An oil finish doesn't dry, it cures. Oxygen kicks off a chain reaction that crosslinks the oil into a solid film, and that reaction runs on radicals handing off to the next radical down the line. Teak's signature extractive, the stuff that makes it teak, grabs those radicals and stops the chain. The oil isn't curing slowly. It's being held down. And the supply of the stuff doing the holding doesn't run out on the timescale you care about. There's plenty of it sitting right in the surface of the wood, well past the amount it takes to shut a cure down. That's why waiting longer does nothing. You're waiting out a poison that isn't leaving.
It isn't just teak. It's a whole class of woods, the oily, fragrant, rot-proof tropicals. Cocobolo, the rosewoods, and their relatives. The same chemistry that makes these woods smell rich and shrug off decay is the chemistry that kills an oil cure. The tell is in your hands before you ever open a can. If the board is greasy to the touch and strong-smelling, that grease and that smell are the waxes and resins that both bead water and stall your finish. A wood that feels oily before you've put any oil on it is telling you something.
There are two honest fixes, and the first is the easy one. Change the finish. Shellac, solvent lacquer, and waterborne coatings cure by completely different chemistry, and the extractives don't touch them. This is the actual reason behind the old shop rule "seal teak with shellac first." The rule was right. Nobody could ever say why, so it got repeated like a superstition. The why is just this: shellac cures by a mechanism the poison can't interfere with, so it goes hard over teak the same as it goes hard over pine. If you've been following that rule on faith, you can stop. There's a reason under it now.
The second fix is for when you've got your heart set on the oiled look. You can have it, but you have to beat the wood to the surface. Degrease with acetone or naphtha to strip the extractives off the top, then get your finish on within about half an hour. The catch is that the window slams shut fast. The extractives you wiped away aren't gone, they're just deeper in the wood, and they start migrating back up to the surface within hours of being cleaned off. Wipe the board at noon and come back to finish it at three and you've oiled a surface that re-poisoned itself while you had lunch. Degrease and finish in one continuous move, or don't bother degreasing at all.
So the bench rule is short. When you've got an oily tropical on the table and you're reaching for oil, stop. Either switch to shellac, lacquer, or a waterborne and let the wood show what it shows, or degrease and finish inside half an hour with no breaks. What you can't do is wipe linseed or tung straight onto raw teak and trust it to cure, because it won't, and you won't find out until two days have passed and the surface is still wet.
This isn't a knock on oil finishes and it isn't a knock on the wood. Both are fine. They just don't go together, and the failure is silent until it's expensive. Match the finish to the wood and the problem disappears. Mismatch them and you'll spend a weekend arguing with a board that was always going to win.