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Starting to race finish the hull
We left the third coat to harden for ten days over Christmas and the gave it its last 240 grit sand. The surface was noticeably harder to sand, it took about a day and a half in total to get the surface completely flat and fair.
It also gave us the opportunity to look at AWLWood in a bit more detail, the finished coating is more akin to a plastic film than varnish. It has a hard surface but also remains incredibly flexible, we were stripping some of our masking tape and despite three coats it was still able to be bend back over on itself without cracking. Think more in terms of the paint protection films that are put on cars.
We are going to leave the hull until we have finished the interior. Then the next steps will be a penultimate coat which will we finish back to 400 grit finish and then the final coat. The final coat is diluted by 10% for its application, but more about that when the time comes.
Interior work
For the interior we are primarily flattening the existing varnish back to remove blemishes and brush marks etc. The weapon of choice is a 125mm orbital sander with 320 sanding disk. Where we are working on the curved surfaces we used a 10mm foam base to keep the sanding disk flat on the surface. Fortunately we can get to well over 90% of the varnish with the sander meaning that we don’t have to do too much hand sanding. For these we are going to do three coats of Epiphanes Clear Gloss varnish.
However for the parts of the boat where there is high contact, many of which are worn down to bare wood, as can be seen from the photo, we are going to redo those with AWLWood, which means we have to fully strip them back to bare wood. To do this we are using a heat gun and a scraper followed by a 60 Grit sand and finally a wire Brillo pad to remove and residual old varnish to make sure we are on bare wood. AWLWood has a primer layer to start the process and that requires the wood surface to be opened with a coarse sandpaper. It is then painted, rollered or put with a cloth to seal the wood and create a chemical bond for the gloss coat.
