Month: April 2020

I finished with the last coats of varnish on the oars, and I painted the first coat of yellow on the interior of the boat.

I never did figure out a way to put a whole coat of varnish on an entire oar in one lick. Best I was able to do was like half an oar at a time. And not like one side, but more in the way of doing the blade and the leathers in one go, and then the other parts of the loom in the other go. So three coats of varnish took six application sessions. And they’re done now.

And I finally braved painting the inside of the boat. I think a big part of my reluctance to paint the inside was how the inside of the boat collects dirt and gritch and such. It was easy enough to blow all that off the bottom and sides of the boat when it was upside down, and it’s not so easy to get it out of the boat when it’s right-side up and catches all that stuff like a big bucket. I finally dragged the vacuum out to the garage and sucked up all the stuff inside the boat.

And with that I put down the first coat on the inside. It looks a little better in the pictures, at least the small thumbnails inline the text here. But it surely needs another coat. I hope just one more coat.

I’d had some ideas as to painting the inside of the transom red, but I got lazy and didn’t. It would have involved taping between the transom and the rest of the inside getting the yellow, as well as taking two more weeks at least doing more red. I’m not sure I even remember why I wanted to do two-tone inside the hull. I think maybe it had something to do with the aluminum parts for the wheels being on both sides of the transom. Yeah, I think that was it.

I slapped another coat of varnish on the oars, and I primed the aluminum parts that make up the wheel assemblies.

The first coat of varnish bubbled a little, so I knocked it down with some 0000 super fine steel wool. I’m much more used to applying varnish by just wiping it on with a rag rather than using a brush. But the instructions on the can say to use a good brush or to spray it on. I don’t have a spray gun, and neither do I have a setup to being spraying such big pieces of work, so ergo I’ve bought and am using a good brush.

I feel a little guilty, too, using an oil-based varnish rather than water-based. I’m being good, in that, after cleaning the brush after each use with mineral spirits, I’m collecting the waste cleaning fluid in an old Mason jar. But, still, I feel like a terrible environmentalist.

I also cleaned up and painted the aluminum parts. I’d been worrying some as to how to remove all the blue layout fluid that remained, but 220 sandpaper and a not insubstantial amount of elbow grease did a fine job. The sanding removed a lot of the surface scratches and blemishes while it was at it, although it didn’t remove quite all of the scribed lines from layout. But the three coats of etching primer did a pretty good job of filling those, as it turned out. The parts look great.

I did the painting in the outside basement area beneath the back porch, but the smell of the spray paint wafted into the house all the same. Tala thought it smelled great, while Dawn hated it. And, like I said, the parts look great.

The darkish gray primer looks really good by itself. I’ve been planning to do red or yellow or both top coats, but now I’m thinking of leaving them as it.