Paint & Varnish: Agony, Ecstasy
"You certainly don’t need to always follow the rules," by Marty Loken
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I know it’s true: Many of you share the agonies I’ve suffered when applying paint and varnish. There might be elusive moments when you appear to know what you’re doing, but they’re followed by soul-crushing catastrophes when everything goes wrong, so wrong. (You know, drippy runs, bugs and dust everywhere and brush marks that suggest you painted the thing with a broom.)
Paint and varnish are that way: No mercy. No shortcuts…although we never stop searching for ways to beat the system.
For me, painting poorly started 63 years ago at age 10, when I built my first boat—a simple 8-foot hydro powered by Grandpa’s 5-hp Johnson. Although the boat was little more than two sheets of fir ply screwed onto wedge-shaped sides, forming what looked like an oversize door stop, I felt the boat deserved something better than the flat, white house paint my dad always applied to fishing skiffs he built in the same basement room. So I managed to scrounge some half-empty quarts of leftover enamel, blue and white, and came up with a swooshy paint scheme--executed crudely but pretty cool if you were 10 years old and full of newbie-boatbuilder pride.
A few years later, when Dad took possession of a rotten 34-foot cruising sailboat, I was given my first semi-professional paint and varnish assignment. (“Professional” because I was given an actual job; “Semi” because no pay was involved.) My task was to start scraping, sanding, painting and varnishing what seemed like a massive ship, and my first particular assignment was to be hoisted aloft—way aloft—in a frighteningly crude bosun’s chair to refinish the mast while dangling 50 feet over the deck. (Nobody else would go up that peeling, sun-bleached, half-delaminated mast. “Just send the boy up there,” I remember one of my dad’s boating cronies suggesting, and up I went, imagining I was aloft on the tallest of tall ships.)
That first varnish and paint job went poorly, but standards were low, allowing my mediocrity to blend with the work of others. We eventually got the 1930s-vintage boat sailing with its haphazard refinish, and enjoyed a number of memorable family adventures.
After that, in teenage years, I turned several fishing boats into outboard “racers,” and by high school was entering water-ski races and local outboard marathons with a variety of actual racing runabouts—all painted or varnished quickly and poorly, but up to the standards of my peers, who shared my obsession with speed but also my lack of regard for the quality of finish.
It wasn’t until my 30s that I started to imagine that paint and varnish might be important, and even potentially done with a bit of care. The turning point came when I dragged home the boat of my maturing nautical dreams, a 1946 round-bottomed cedar launch known as a Poulsbo Boat, 16 feet of tumblehome-transomed beauty that was in terrible shape and cried out for a complete and proper restoration (stem separating from planks, steam-bent frames split or broken altogether, a punky mahogany transom and gutted interior.) The boat was a floating disaster, and I loved it dearly.
The Poulsbo Boat wasn’t just another plywood junker to patch up, use and discard. It was my first “real” boat, and so I began to learn more about filling and fairing hulls, scraping and sanding…and then sanding some more; about primers and different paints, and which colors looked right on a traditional hull; and about how much all of those marine-paint products cost—even back then, 40 years ago.
So, my first favorite paint was Z-Spar’s alkyd marine enamel in what seemed like a traditional color called Atlantic Green. I’d noticed a lot of dark green on old boats, so this seemed like a good idea. I applied Atlantic Green with a cheap brush over the hullsides of the Poulsbo Boat, selecting an off-white enamel for the sheerstrakes. After a primer coat and four coats of green, hand-sanding between coats, the boat looked gorgeous to my eyes…as long as I ignored the runs, brush hairs, bugs and dust particles everywhere.
Let’s get to the point: After many years of experiencing every kind of paint and varnish product out there, and after surviving what might be called my High Gloss Period (varnish or paint—everything glossy), I’ve finally settled down, sobered up and realized that you don’t have to pay a bloody fortune for every paint and varnish product in order to have acceptable results, and you certainly don’t need to always follow the rules…well, at least not all of the rules, when selecting or using paint and varnish products.
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