Winter 2012 - Of Shrink Wrapping and Varnish

Time marches on...

It is almost three weeks since we left the boat on the hard in Port Severn. As you will see from the picture below, she's been all shrink-wrapped. It's the first time we've done this as the cost has always been prohibitive. Especially down in Toronto. But since we got a more north-friendly price on our winter storage package, we decided to bite the bullet this year and wrap her up. We have been doing a lot of wood-work and gel-coat renewal this past year, so the additional protection is warranted probably. 

Mary Mary in her shrink-wrap

The 'bright-work' (all wooden and varnished surfaces) is a continual job on a Grand Banks and we have only just figured out a good combination of stains and varnish that seems to work quite well. Except for areas that we didn't get around to giving enough coats to during our summer on the Trent. These are starting to show signs of degradation already and we may even have to do some surfaces from scratch. But it is hard as stink to get yourself to be sanding and varnishing all the time where there's so much laying around to do. If only we could figure out how to get the cats involved somehow. Maybe with little brushes on their tails.

We have found that with the teak we have that  a good combination of steps is as follows:

1.      Clean the wood with either teak cleaner or mineral spirits

2.      Sand the wood to base, then fine sand

3.      Then a coat of protective oil (we have been using Australian Timber Oil, neutral tone, basically except when we couldn't get 'neutral' and had to use 'honey' which is slightly richer in texture but not really noticeable over all)

4.      Then 8 coats of varnish with fine sanding in between each coat. (We use Epifanes for this; a Dutch product.)

Hand rail with three coats of varnish

After this you maintain it by keeping it dry when possible and once a year find and repair weaknesses. When we get back to it in 2013 we'll try once again to be more disciplined with it. Anyway, that's the theory.