Preparation
Before Christmas 2024 we had completed the initial sand of the hull. Although we were going from traditional varnish to AWLGrips’ AWLWood, we didn’t want to go down to bare wood.
The objective was fair the hull by long boarding with 280 grit sand paper. We were working down through the existing layers, we found one layer which hadn’t bonded to the preceding layer properly.
This was consistent along the whole hull, giving a consistent layer to aim for and reduced the chances of the AWLWood not bonding properly. This is a risk of not going down to bare wood and priming with AWLWood Primer.
After Christmas we flipped the hull over to sand and varnish the interior, leaving the exterior in its sanded state. This proved to be a mistake, the surface picked up a load of contamination which didn’t get removed with standard cleaning. Net effect was the first layer we put on ended up looking like the surface of the moon. Which was annoying…
Application
In order to fix the issue we had to sand that layer off and restart the process. After sanding, we cleaned the hull with copious water, drying the hull with a soft sponge, then rewashing the hull with a vinegar/water mix, again drying with a soft sponge. Finally another rub down with AWLWood reducer.
Needless to say we were a bit nervous when we did the next coat. But the extra effort was worthwhile, this is the first coat. Which as with the gunwales we sanded with 280 grit sand paper. On the plus side because we were now confident the hull is fair we could use a Dual Action Orbital sander for this which made the process much quicker than hand sanding.
To apply the AWLWood, we used a 4″ Roller and then tipped the finish with a soft 1.5″ brush. As we applied the coat it looked smooth and the shine was fantastic. However when we sanded, we realised that AWLWood doesn’t flow out as readily as varnish.
This meant we had to rethink our application/sanding approach. Rather than taking the layer fully back down, we only partially sanded the layer. Did two more layers partially sanding between each layer. After the third layer we did a full flattening sand on the three layers.
This gave us a to work around the flow issue.
We did this three times, accepting that we would probably lose at least one out of each three layers. The final three layers we approached differently. The first we sanded the previous layer with 400 Grit sandpaper and applied unreduced AWLWood. The last two we sanded to 400 Grit and applied the layers reduced by 10% with AWLWood Reducer.
Final Finish
For the canoe body (Below the cline line), we wanted to race finish the hull. Even with the careful application, there were still ripples in the finish. The last stage is to wet and dry sand the hull in various grades from 600 to 3000 Grit. Using our DA Orbital sander which sped the process up.
The final steps were to use an orbital polisher using G3, G10 rubbing compounds and finally Harken HullKote.
This process did take some of the depth out of the shine when viewed close up, the overall hull finish is super smooth and very low friction.
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- Data Driven Decision Making – I14 Handicaps – The RYA’s response and the Rickmansworth results
- Classic I14 – Where we are & how we got here – The Mast
- Data Driven Decision Making – How to develop a fair handicap for all 14s, especially those in the Vintage and Classic fleets
- Classic I14 – Where we are & how we got here – Fitout