More to the Point

In the continuing saga of the fogged varnish we left off last Tuesday with weather frustration.  Fog had rolled in and ruined my plans to repair the work that had been damaged by dew.  On Friday I got back to it.  I went over it again with 180 grit paper, wiped it down and crossed my fingers.  I had checked the weather and found that temperatures were going to be hovering right around 40 degrees F.  That's not really ideal varnishing weather and I had heard reports that you don't want to lay down a coat if it's colder than 50 out.  Well, that may be but I'm feeling kinda desperate here, mightily pressed for time and I'm concerned that if I don't get a few more coats on then the long cold winter will destroy what I've already done.  The whole point of doing the teak this Fall was to reduce the amount of work that I'll have to do next March.  So I gave this some thought and figured I wouldn't have much to lose if it didn't work out.  What really pushed me on was the fact that the dew point on Friday was at 17 degrees F and was supposed to stay more than 20 degrees below the air temperature all day.  I had read somewhere that this was the magic formula, 20 degrees of separation.

I got started at 1100 when the air temperature got above 40 and finished by 1400.  I was just finishing up the bowsprit when I realized I couldn't hold the brush any longer.  I pushed on and finished but  I was shivering uncontrollably and babbling like an idiot.  Hey, be nice! Got my brush cleaned up and called it a day.  It took me until that evening to finally thaw out.

That night I had nightmares about ruined varnish and stripping down teak in the snow.  I finally rolled out of bed around 0600 but it was still dark out, too dark to see if the teak had survived.  Finally around 0730 I went out and checked it out.  It came out fine.  The 20 degree magic formula worked.  I can't describe how relieved I was.  The surface was still kinda tacky so I decided to leave it alone, let it cure completely.  Rain was called for on Sunday so I was pretty much done with varnish for the weekend.

I sat out in the cockpit for a few hours with a heating pad under my butt and polished and installed two more stanchions.  This completes the re-bedding on the port side.  The four other stanchions on that side were done last week so I ran a razor blade around the bases of those and cleaned them up.  They came out looking pretty good.  The next coat of varnish will help to seal the bases but I wouldn't get that done before the next rain so I covered them over with masking tape.  Be a bummer to have the teak turn black after all this work.

Next weekend the forecast is not prime for Friday but I may be able to get another coat of varnish done on Saturday.  The air temperature will be around 41 but the dew point will be way down at 13.  It'll be like that for most of the day so there should be enough time to lay down another coat and have it start to set before the conditions deteriorate.  Perfect!

I still need to order the stainless wire for the life-lines but I do have the tubing and fittings for the hard railing around the cockpit.  Maybe I'll get started on that next Friday.

Since this teak project has taken over my life I've been re-thinking my goals.  I had wanted to get eight coats on but realistically five would get me through the winter.  I've got four coats on already down the port side and across the stern.  There's three from the stern up to the side gate and two coats from there up to the bowsprit.  I'm pretty sure I can get five coats on all around before I turn into a pop sickle.  Then next March I'll be able to lay down three more to finish it up while the boat's out of the water for fresh bottom paint.

Once I have five coats on I can move on to something else.  For this winter I have a few things at the top of the priority list.  I want to install some cabinets in the aft stateroom along the hull on the port side.  We have a ten inch wide shelf there above the bunk that would serve very nicely as a support for a "wall hung" type cabinet and then on the aft bulkhead I want to mount another for storing tools. We priced having custom cabinets made when we re-did the galley but for these two small cabinets they wanted $5k.  Yeah, I know, custom work and all that.  I'm still not willing to do that, even if we did have the money.  I looked around on-line and found that Home Depot has a very nice maple cabinet selection (click here) and you can get cabinet faces that have just the face frame with doors and hinges.  I figure I could use these and build some "custom" cabinets of my own.  The frames and doors are solid wood with the recessed inner door panel being the only part that has MDF.  It comes in a nice cinnamon stain that kinda resembles the color of our teak.  Where these cabinets are going the only folks who'll be seeing them will be Bella or the occasional guest.  Total cost for the cabinets will be less than $600.

Once I have the cabinets installed then I can get back to work on the water maker.  That is the ultimate goal for this winter, to have that installed and running by February of '15.  That's like, what, three months. My project history shows that to be about three months short.  We'll see how it goes.