Monday 17 January 2023
Today was a good day to start varnishing as it was a bit overcast and cooler and the wind wasn’t stirring up the dust. The first thing I did was to have a big clean up and a vacuum around the shed with JP’s wonderfully powerful machine. I cleared all the surfaces I would need to lay out the thwarts and recovered them in the last of the baking paper and some cling film. I realised I would need some wooden toggles on the bottom of the cox’s seat to hold it in position and just as I started Veronica walked in and I gladly handed over that job to her. She cut a piece of oregon left over from the outer gunwale and rounded the ends before drilling and fixing them in place on the bottom of the seat.
Harry joined us and I gave him the job of sanding the stern footrest ready for painting.
I used a cloth with the Awlgrip primer to coat the thwart pins and the newly shaped rowlock blocks with their initial coat of varnish. I then applied the second coat of deck paint to the floor of the boat while Veronica painted the stern footrest with white two pack primer.
We stopped for morning tea and had the remaining ginger nuts. I’m afraid the standard of catering is slipping as we near the end of the project.
Veronica gave the thwarts a light sand while I made the finishing touches to the deck painting and then cleaned the brushes. Barney had had enough by now and so Veronica took him home and I made a start on varnishing the thwarts and the gunwales. Getting varnish evenly into the slots in the gunwales is a time consuming and brush destroying job as I expected it would be. Again I could only make things go a little smoother by listening to podcasts of the ABC science show.
The last job of the day was to paint the footrest face with deck paint and of course clean up the brushes.
Cheers Dave