The Cabin Cover and Washboards.....

First job was to make a temporary washboard from marine ply to enable us to take the originals home to work on. We did a similar arrangement for the cabin cover.  Both items were given a couple of coats of cheaper varnish to provide some protection despite the fact that they wouldn't be open to the elements over the winter.

The starting point:



Not pretty and certainly not weatherproof.........

In reasonable condition but wanted to get back to the original colour rather than the stained varnish finish.

Onto the hard work and long January nights in a cold garage.......

One tip I would recommend anyone to take is this: use good quality brushes and buy a 'Brush Machine'.  This is basically a box that holds your brushes in between use without the need for cleaning every time. How does it work?    well, a solvent 'gauze' that comes with it as part of the kit keeps the varnish 'good' on the brushes - even a year later as we start to prepare for our second winter of refurbishing the brushes are ready to use! We will need to replace the gauze soon (it has an indicator to tell you when to change it) but worth it due to the saving on brush cleaner and time / mess.  You can get them from good decorator's merchant stores.

So.........the metalware was removed and everything sanded down to bare wood using 60 grit sandpaper, with a gradual rise to 400 grit. Cork blocks were used to keep the flat surfaces neat and an old flexible sandpaper block for the curved surfaces.

We used Epifanes Clear Gloss at 50% for the first coat, 75% for the second, 85% for the third, 95% for the fourth then 100% thereafter to seven coats, sanding down with 240 grit in between each coat. Epifanes is a fairly thick varnish and takes a bit of practice to get the brush technique right but you do this in effect on the first few building coats.  Sanding lightly in between coats my seem excessive but this will help you to get even varnish layers as you'll be able to see where you've missed and prevent 'holidays' (areas where the new layer of varnish doesn't coat properly for some reason).  It will also level out the microscopic natural ridges in the wood to give you a shinier finish.
If there was any hint that the previous layer of varnish was still too soft to work on then work was suspended for a day (we could tell this from the feel of the sandpaper 'grabbing' when starting to work).

These pictures show the progress through to the finished items:

Sanded ready for first coat of 50%

First coat on...




Third coat at 85%



Seventh coat and in storage to harden off.




Close up of the seventh coat - very pleased with our efforts...very shiny!



Not sure why this ended up on it's side when I uploaded it but it did!  The finished washboards.......