Dining and quiet evening at Barco, Friday night. Up and at 'em Saturday, went out to find new clothes for the Spousal Unit (12 Outfits!) then back home to re-rig for afternoon doing varnish.
I really dread varnish work. I'm not good at it and it is very messy. Couldn't find all the proper sandpaper, had to make do with 60 grit to strip the old varnish off. I couldn't even find my paint scraper. Delays...
Sanding with 60 grit is exciting, as it strips everything off, and most rikky-tik. Ya wanna watch closely, because the wood also will reduce down to sawdust. Not that I would know anything about that.
Most people like goals or incentives, since Captain Ron learned about that in rehab, so I set some really attainable goals; Like ten feet of front facing teak. I thought if it is a small amount, I might be able to actually finish the task.
Baby steps.
Plus, it was going on 1500. Sort of late in the day, so I expedited the effort even with out the proper equipage. The wood was looking clean and I was surprised that the sanding took only 20 minutes.
60 Grit sandpaper, baby!
So I applied the blue masking tape to prevent the inevitable mess. One does not want errant varnish on the white gelcoat. It never really comes off, for years. Trust me. After applying said 3M miracle tape, I poured a small amount of half varnish/half thinner mixture into a can and proceded to place the first coat.
Done in less time than to type it out. What will I do with the brush and unusable excess varnish?
Trash run.
I settled down with a contented sigh of hard labor completed, and cracked open the fourth Pabst of the afternoon.
"Is that it?", sayeth the Mistress.
"Yep".
"Doesn't it take longer, usually? Spaketh She.
I pontificate; "Sure, but in order to not overwhelm myself at the largeness of this project, I took a little bite. Otherwise, I would quit because of the little things that seem to pop up and make the varnishing more cumbersome."
"Oh."
So Sunday was a second coat of varnish and remove the bimini and side panels. I will bring the bimini in for repairs and refitting. We need new zippers, badly. I will put a third coat of varnish on today.
2 comments:
I assume this is a hand-sanding operation, i.e., with a block and not some sort of power sander?
I use the break-it-down-into-small-steps approach, too. Works pretty well.
Hey Buck,
I appreciate your impression that I might actually hand sand. No, no, no... I have very little patience and if forced to go slow I would wreck the wood by concentrating on one area, or something.
The sander is a marine professional type Palm Sander that resides in a square, black box waiting for opportunities like this one. The hand sanding happens between coats.
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