Monday 12 September
The extracurricular activities this weekend included cleaning up the shed and putting the rubbish out and cutting battens into gunwale blocks for boat 2. This time we are using Queensland’s Hoop pine for contrast to Oregon. The Hoop pine is timber leftover from the hog we replaced. Roger and Dr John had milled it into 19 x 45mm battens and I took it round to JP’s where we cut it up using a home made jig on a drill press so that each block has a concave end.
I did have quite a bit of time away from the boats as well, managed to slip in a surf and a motor out onto a still inlet late on Sunday afternoon.
Today we are attempting to finish the resin coating on the inside of boat 2 and later apply the first coat of varnish primer to the gunwales. I needed to finish a little bit of sanding under the outside gunwale before we could begin and also wet and dry sand the second coat of resin. Mark helped me with the latter while JP fine sanded the thwarts and hung them up like an art installation.
Mark then took the veneer battens for boat 2 up to Harry’s other shed to thickness them to 5 x 9mm to sit on top of the plywood grain.
JP and I had a tea break and then got stuck into the resin coating with JP rolling on and with me tipping off, except it was so warm today that it was more like smearing thick honey on toast.
JP and I have bought new face mask equipment to ward off the evil fumes we are going to encounter later this afternoon from the AwlGrip, AwlWood varnish. This stuff has been recommended as being very long lasting once you have applied 8 coats I hope its worth the fumes. The reason we are doing it tonight is that there is this odd window of opportunity to cover the clear primer with the first gloss coat of 9 – 14 hours and 15 deg C. We’ll be back in first thing to do the gloss coat. Let you know how it went tomorrow.
Cheers Dave