Boat Repair, Restoration, Building
I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. — Thomas Edison
Adding a layer of fiberglass cloth to any wooden boat will add an enormous amount of toughness to it. And if you do it right, the fiberglass is invisible. That’s right — invisible. The problem is in the “doing it right” part.
Okay, let’s step back a bit. Continue reading “Fiberglass Setback”
You find out there’s more to know.
Well, that’s often the case here at Ashley River Boatworks, anyway. In my last post, I talked about making a test strip to decide what stain and finish options to use in the Palm Beach 22 runabout we’re building. I wanted to test some conventional oil based stains next to a new staining system by Awlgrip that I used on a previous project–a restoration of a 1949 Chris Craft runabout. Continue reading “Just When You Think You Know What You’re Doing…”
With all the interior work finished, it’s time to focus on the pretty part. It’s time to finish stripping the hull, repair holes and dings, and stain the hull. All this precedes the varnishing phase. I use the most aggressive chemical stripper I can find (Jasco brand) and let it do the work for me. I slap it on liberally and let it sit there awhile and eat away the old varnish. You can actually hear and see it doing this if you watch closely. Continue reading “Staining the boat”
We talked about patching some rotten wood in the dashboard of a 1949 Chris Craft 17 ft. Deluxe Runabout in an earlier post here. Once we got the staining done, the next step was to lay on a bunch of varnish. In our case, it took about 5 coats of Interlux Schooner 96 to seal in the stain. Then we added about 8 coats of AwlWood MA urethane on top of that to get a really nice, deep gloss. This is the scheme I plan to use for finishing the topsides of the boat as well. The AwlWood is a new product for the U.S. It’s been available in New Zealand for a few seasons, and has held up well there. Continue reading “Finishing the Dashboard”