I’ve been lucky enough to avoid epoxy and varnish for most of my boat building life, although both are making more frequent appearances since we developed the pedal drive adapter box. The plan here was just to varnish the box, but I decided to do the bottom board as well just to keep it from getting so filthy and then the frames because they’re gonna take a lot of abuse as well. I managed to restrain myself from varnishing the stems at the last moment. Oil is fine for most things and a lot less time consuming and expensive.
I’ve been using this total boat water based Halcyon for a while now (wasn’t that the name of the drug that Reagan was on?) And even though it will never lay down as nicely as something like epiphanes it burns a lot less brain cells and goes on 10 times faster. (One hour recoat, no sanding). Last winter we tortured tested it for four months in direct Mexican sunlight and I didn’t see any visible breakdown so it seems sufficiently durable.
___
This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
