Varnishing as a meditation practice
It’s true, varnishing is meditation. Varnish doesn’t care about you, and she doesn’t care if you’re in a hurry, if you only have 5 minutes, if you’re tired, or if just bought an expensive new Epifanes brush. If you’re not fully present and engaged, The Varnish will make you regret it with a shrug of her glossy shoulders.
Here’s the goal: apply a coat of varnish, approximately the consistency of thin honey, about paper thickness to a surface. Make that coat even and shiny, with no sags, drips, curtains or holidays.
Sag: The varnish has developed a thin film but the liquid beneath the film still runs a bit and it bunches up in a lumpy way, like when you don’t pull the covers tight and you get wrinkles in your bedspread.
Drip: That’s easy, just like it sounds. Like candle wax dripping down the side of the candle.
Curtain: A long undulating sag.
Holiday: A spot that’s either bare or obviously hasn’t gotten enough varnish.
This get’s tricky when that surface is not laying flat. Like, say, a mast on its side. The varnish starts to dry the second you brush it on. As it dries, it gets tacky and you can’t work with it any more. Brush it, and you just makes things worse. So, before it dries substantially, you have to brush on an even coat, catch the places where it’s starting to flow downhill and spread it out again. Essentially you have to coax it into place with constant, smooth brushing.
Let you attention drift for a bit, and you’ve left a holiday, or something else unpleasant that you’ll just have to sand out later.
I have got so much respect for good varnishers. It’s truly a skill. So, when you see a boat with really nice varnish work on her wood, take a moment to admire how someone was able to lay that down for coat after coat after coat. We’re shooting for 7 coats on all the bright finished (i.e., not painted) surfaces.
Strong directional light is not just you’re friend when you’re varnishing, it’s a critical tool. The technique is to brush on a bit, spread it, and check your work by looking at the reflection of the light on the surface of your varnish.
See the twin holidays just to the right of the light reflection?
Here you can see a variety of rough spots on the left side, and a slight holiday in the left foreground.
My first tries were much worse, and then I discovered Penetrol. Be still my beating heart! I’m in love. You add just a little of this stuff to your varnish and it slows the drying time and improves the way it flows. It makes it infinitely easier for people like me to lay down an acceptable coat of varnish by giving me more time to go back and brush out mistakes before the varnish starts to get tacky and unworkable. So, under ideal conditions (our shop has been in the high 60’s, low 70’s, good humidity, no direct sun), I’m able to put down an average quality coat of varnish that will require about 20 minutes of sanding / prep before I put down the next coat. Yesterday, with no Penetrol, I had runs and holidays galore. This brought up prep time to almost an hour. You sand a bit with a flexible block sander and subtle drips that you missed a moment ago just appear:
A little more careful sanding to blend them in with the rest of the varnish and you can proceed.
The upstairs here has been slowly developing into a varnishing area over the last couple of months with the 2nd years in particular just setting up work wherever they could. When we started adding our stuff (3 spars & 2 large coamings / boat plus assorting tillers and boom crutches…) it started to get really chaotic.
A group of us took a couple of hours the other morning to impose order on this mess and that’s helped a ton.
Now at least we’re not bumping into someone else’s wet varnish when we try to work on our own sticks.
Along with varnishing, we’ve been painting. Our deck is a stunning blue that everyone compares to velvet. Perhaps we can put an Elvis with a single tear coming from his eye on the foredeck?
We took out the coamings and have been varnishing them off the boat.
This allows us to flip the boat back upside down so we could finish fairing the hull. This means putting surface putty in all the seams to make a perfectly smooth surface. Here you can see the white putty just after we squashed it into all the small indentions that define the seams. It only shows up here against the red bottom primer.
Now, if you’re a boat builder, you may feel inclined to shoot me off a little email that says something to the effect of: “Excuse me son, but you shouldn’t be putting surfacing putty below the waterline.” Well, all I have to say to you is, Where the hell were you at 10:30 this morning when we popped open the can, eh? You were probably jawboning wth our teachers who also didn’t notice what we were up to until we’d almost completed the entire boat.
This stuff dries almost instantly (Acetone and Toluline… mmm, now that’s a mixture designed to produce birth defects if ever there was one) and it’s not coming out any time soon. So, we just sand the bottom like we sand the topsides (the sides of the hull above the waterline) prime it all again, and call it good. The problem is that it’s likely to flake off sometime in the future. Not a huge deal, but a pain for later upkeep.
Speaking of birth defects from carcinogenic chemicals, I’m kind of hoping to grow an arm out of the center of my chest from all this. it could be incredibly useful.
But, before I stagger out of the shop in a tolulene haze, I’ll have had a vison of a beautiful, smooth hull with no visible plank lines. It’s almost like owning a plastic boat… I know, shut yer damn mouth.
That’s what surfacing compound, fairing, and a coat of primer will get ya. In a season after the wood has swelled and stabilized, it’ll push putty out of the seams and we’ll ge plank lines again, this time showing up as ridges (rather than indentations). Proper care dictates sanding the boat smooth again at this point and repainting. After that, it should continue to look smooth.
The buyer of our boat asked that we put on a boot stripe in addition to the normal paint job. That’s like a racing stripe just above the waterline. When the boat was right side up, I used a water level to mark out a level line about 1 1/4″ above the waterline all around the boat. Once we flipped the boat, we connected our dots and faired the line with a batten
And then cut a small groove in the hull with a saw following the batten. That groove forms the upper border of our boot stripe.
You can just make out the thin groove we cut a while back to mark the border of the waterline and topsides.
Lastly, Kev got the idea that we should bright finish the transom. I thiought it would be too much work, but once he got it sanded down, it looked so good I was totally on board. So, we’re gonna have the prettiest bum in the fleet.
