The Art of Sanding and Varnishing a S&G Kayak - Petrel Play SG - E28

Hey welcome back to The Guillemot Kayaks Workshop! I'm Nick Schade, this is Bill, and we are continuing to work on the Petrel, a stitch and glue sea kayak kit from Chesapeake Light Craft.

Chesapeake Light Craft supplied the kit, but it is my design. In the last episode, I did sanding on the surface here, trying to level this for the final finished sanding. That's mostly complete. What we are going to try to do is complete all the finished sanding and try to get on a coat of varnish at the end of the day today.

What we're going to do is finish up with the 80 grit, get rid of the last shiny here, some of the places I didn't get to, and then we'll start working our way up the grits. So we'll work up the grits to get to 220 grit sandpaper. I'm sticking with hand sanding for now. Some of these places, there's really no other way down in these recesses around the cockpit here, etc. There's really no other way, and on these narrows sections, trying to do this area with power tools, you just burn right through the glass quite quickly. So we'll just get right to it.

So we've got this area here we can get in and reach like this, but we have a couple drips left there, a big honk and drip right there. So we can take that down. We don't want to scratch too deeply into the surrounding surface. And again, see with the stiff tool, it's really only hitting that high spot and just sliding over the smooth surface. So you can get it most of the way down with that, and then when we come with this, we want to really be careful about holding it flat to that surface. You do anything like this, it's going to burn right through that edge. So being very conscious about holding it flat to that surface.

All right, put your pressure sort of in the middle of the surface as opposed here. I'm just sort of so it doesn't toggle on this right. We don't want it to rock over that. So and then this is the vacuum control to turn that on and off, and just work our way and watch what you're doing. If you start to see you're burning into the edge, back off, back off, and we do want to get this surface cleaned up a little, little bit. This will be covered under the the hatch ring, so it doesn't need to be perfect down on that flat surface, but here we want that nice and as smooth as possible.

All right, can wear that if you want. Okay. What I always do with these, I leave them on the table. I'm doing something else, you know, with the saw or something, they fill off and then I put them on, yeah, full of dust.

So one thing I think it's worth telling people is the the dust collection is really good for health reasons, but it also makes the sanding go quicker. If I just take this sanding block and do some sanding there, I get the sandpaper all gummed up with dust, yeah, where if I come in and take that dust off as it's going, it will be more efficient sanding, yep, instead of getting big piles of dust that are in your way, just keep cleaning it out with the vacuum. So even if you don't have fancy tools that have inte a dust collection, just having a vacuum nearby. And the other thing I do with these is I will switch them around every once in a while, one end gets worn faster. Okay, that's just so question as far as these humps go, do you want those right down flush? You don't need to get them flushed, just get it roughed up, oh, just roughed up, yeah. You know, I'm, I got some 60 grit on here, we'll come by and level those out with something coarser later.

So is this good? Yeah, oh, it's good. That's kind of hard to get it, yeah. It's hard to get at. So sanding around the coaming here is tricky. Some of the stuff we can just get with a sanding block, and these will reach under a little bit, but you can't reach under here. So I've made a couple sort of custom tools. This was one of them, basically a little bit of sandpaper goes on that surface there, right there, and that with that, you can reach under here, a piece of 60 grit sandpaper. We can stick it on there, so piece of 60 git on there, and now get in under here. So that's one I made with just a piece of cedar, and you know, glued together. I think I use hot milk glue on that. And this is a variation on that theme. This is some ikea hook that came with some ikea thing we got, and I hot mil glued that to another piece of wood, again with sandpaper on the bottom, and now we can use that to get underneath here, you you see how that, yep, nice and that works well, yeah, yeah. That, that this is hard to get the pressure right where you want it. It works, but this, you can basically push down right above it and that works quite well.

The other surface it's hard to get, well, there's several surfaces that are hard to get. There's the underside of the lip here, oh yeah. We don't need to do a good job there, but we should rough it up or smooth it out there, can be drips and hangy down bits if you run your finger under there, yep. Similar idea, but the sandpaper is on the top side. So we put it in under there and lift up. And then trying more on these things, here's one that's sort of intended to get all the surfaces at once. There's the vertical surface on the inside of the riser here. So that face of that goes in there, and I can push it hard against this, that vertical surface. This also has the bottom side, which can get underneath the lip if you make the spacing right. You can make it so so it gets the underside of the lip too. So those are things I've come up with. And again, having dust collection nearby so you can just vacuum out that dust as you work, yeah, makes things a lot more efficient. So I've got several things here that sort of suit that purpose, you you can give them a try, see what works for you. If you want more sandpaper on there, okay, go ahead with more sandpaper, and gunti, and you know, you you can just try the oldfashioned, get under here with your fingers. I think that that's not out of the question if you don't have what it takes to make the custom tools, but again, some of these places are kind of hard to reach with that.

I think it's looking pretty good, yeah, yeah. This, there's a lot going on in this shape here, yeah. It's difficult to get, and sometimes it's just a matter of getting in there with a loose piece of sandpaper and cleaning it up, but but yeah, all your little tools there are necessary, otherwise you just can't, they, yeah, it's really hard to do in there. You know, like I say, you can reach in with your finger, but you know, making the tool that act like your finger to get in there can save a lot of a lot of time and stress and fingers, and fingers, yeah.

So we have some remaining shiny spots. These were places where as the epoxy sort of drained down the side, it left some tracks, and I prefer getting rid of these by pushing the whole area around it down, but eventually that gets a little tired some and so going in and spot sanding a little bit, we're going to end up with a little bit of a hollow by doing that, but it's a matter of how much patience you have, you know, going with a you know taking the whole area down here versus you know going in locally here, but you're still making it flat more or less, you're not going with your, right, right, yeah, right. I'm not trying to just get rid of the shiny spot. I am trying to lower the area around it, but I'm concentrating on on one area. So it's going to make this area a little bit of a depression.

And part of what we can think about is why are we trying to varnish it, and the reason we're varnishing it is to protect the epoxy from uv, it's not to make it shiny and pretty. That's a side effect, yeah. What I'm trying to do when I'm leveling it all down is trying to make the smoothest shiniest prettiest surface possible, you know, when you look at a really nicely detailed car, you get these nice smooth reflections on the body panels that have don't have any ripples in it, and that's a matter of fairing it out flat, flat, yeah. You know, it's a curve so flats kind of of weird term, but by going in here and sanding this area, I am creating a little

We're making it shiny because we're putting varnish on it, and then we're putting varnish on it to protect it from UV, making that reflection perfect is an aesthetic choice. It's not going to affect the performance of the boat any, and eventually you get to decide how much patience you have, how pretty do you want it, right? You know, are you gonna beat the crap out of it and you know, the first day out you're going to have it so scratched up that these reflections won't matter anymore, that that, right? So that's that's the decision we're making. And you know, I've been trying to show you sort of the best way to make it look really great, but eventually I might notice the reflection change I'm creating right now, but most people won't, no. And so you know, I'm just going to go ahead and do it.

And the risk of using the big thing here is we're going to start to grind into the edge here, and I, you know, just because of, see it, just little you're starting to see that the the weave is showing there. So you know, by concentrating on this area a little bit, I can get that down. So there were some air bubbles in there as as well as, so the sags, and we'll see if the sanding will get down below all that.

So there still some shiny spots, we get some room to go though, that's looking pretty good really. There were some air bubbles trapped in there, but they're sanded out now. So I'm pretty happy with that, taking care of these last remaining spots here.

All right, so the the deck's looking pretty good. We just have a few spots left to sort of touch up like I was just doing, and so let's go ahead and touch up those spots, then we'll flip it, be over, finalize the hull, and then we'll start working up in the grits.

Ni. Okay, so I think we've got the deck sanded out pretty well, let's just uh flip it over and look at the hull. So this is pretty good how it is, and so this is say I've used a mixture of 60 and 80 grit here, yep. So from now on on this surface, all we're trying to do is reduce the scratches, just get scratches so the varnish looks nice, nice, yeah. So it levels out nicely, the the 60 grit scratches will throw show through a bunch of coats of varnish. The finer you get, the fewer coats of varnish you need to hide all scratches, right? So all right, let's just give give it a flip over, little more work now and less work later, right, yeah, be basically all the fairing or the level sanding is most of the finish work. The rest of the sanding is just getting rid of the scratches from that, so we're not trying to level things out, we're just going over the already scratched areas and putting different scratches on them until the scratches are so small we can't see them anymore.

So this has some of these narrow panels here which I was using the long board on, so didn't fit. So we'll just come in with the narrower sanding block, okay, um and take care of that.

All right, so that's a lot of work, that's a lot of work, yeah. But one thing, one point I've been trying to make, and I, you know, as I've been doing this, I've been trying to think of other ways of saying it, but lots of people are really afraid to use a coros script sandpaper, uhuh. I'm using 60 right here, yeah. I don't like sanding any more than anybody else does, therefore I use the sandpaper that's going to get the job done as quick as possible, right? Part of what we're doing here is removing material to make a level flat surface, right? So we want to remove material quickly, right? If we were going at this with 120, we' never be, you know, we'd end up just leaving the ripples, it, it would all be sanded, but it would all be ripple, yeah. What we're trying to do is get it level and flat, and so we're doing the hard work with the coarse paper, right? And now all the sanding we do, it's already level, it's already pretty easy to get the surface sanded because you lay your sanding block on that surface, it's touching everything, yeah. So when you go with the next grit, you're not struggling to get everything level and smooth, just trying to remove enough material that the scratches you made with the previous stuff are gone, right? So I think, um, we've we've put in some hard work on this, and then we'll, after lunch, we'll quickly go through the grits and get it ready for first go to varnish.

Okay, so we just had some lunch, and now we're in the sort of des scratch ifying stage. Everything should be nice and level, we just want to make it so the varnish isn't going to telegraph the the scratches through. I think what we'll do is hit the whole thing with 80, we we've used sort of a mixture of 80 and 60, and so just get it to a good uniform 80 grit, and this is should be substantially easier. It's just going over the whole thing so this systematically. I'll work from one end to the other here. You could go one end on one panel and then back on the other panel and do each p panel individually, but I, that's whatever you're comfortable with. We want to continue to leave some of the shiny bits here, this process should make those shiny bits a little bit narrower, but again we don't want to hit that too hard because it's easy to grind through there at some point. Do you take the shine off it? Yeah, yeah, we, before varnishing, basically will go back, deal with the seams as as a step by itself, pretty much.

So that didn't take too long, not too bad. It was, you know, basically s, it's 80 grit already, so we were just sort of doing a little touchup. You pointed out some places where there's some bubbles and stuff here, and I want to show you one way to deal with that. So around the edge of the recess here, we have some places where the the glass had trouble conforming to that shape, ended up with some little bubbles, right in there, and then when we went sanded, basically sanded through those bubbles. So you know, ideally right now the glass is gone there. So technically this is a slightly weak spot. Honestly, I'm not that worried about it, it's got glass on the other side and glass all around it. We're not making the space shuttle here, so I'm just going to take some super glue and fill that spot in. So this way, when we sand it, it'll, that'll level out a little bit, it's build up enough there that we can sand that down flat in with a little super glue, a spritz. Then when that hardens, I, we'll just sand that flat. The super glue is a lot harder than other stuff, but that just fills in that pit, and it'll sand smooth. And so there won't be a low spot in there when we go to varnish it.

So I just want to talk briefly about what I mean by getting rid of the scratches. So here we got the back deck, and you can see some scratches in the finish from the the corser grit, so all these lines here. So it can help doing what I just did there, changing the direction, right? Now you still see scratches here, but they're all going this way, where the original scratches were going this way, you know? There it's not that you're getting rid of scratches completely, but if we look here, there's a lengthwise scratch up in the end, you see scratches going that way, and down here you'll see scratches  headed out that way. So that's the process, and it can be a little bit hard to see if you keep sanding in the same direction, but that's the goal is just to get the scratches from the previous crit to mostly disappear. We're not trying to be that particular, the better job you get do of making those scratches disappear, the better the finish will look, but we're starting to pick knits if we get too obsessed about that, but that's the basic idea.

Looking good. So do we have to get out those one-of aind tools and get in here or what do you do? You know, if we're trying for, you know, fine furniture quality here then yeah, we want to get in there, but I'm most concerned about having varnish stick and, okay, be protective, and we're not going to see in here very well, no, as far as whether it's really smooth and shiny under there, yeah. So for my own personal boats, I just get lazy and and don't get in under there, lazy works for me every day, yeah. So that, that's my theory, y, all right. So flip it over, do the hull.

So as you discovered, one of the ways you can tell if you've sanded it is it, if it feels better, nice, and you start to see the wood gra, clear clearer as you get pler, g, I'm saying the amount of time that took us, let's go ahead and do the 220 on the whole thing, right, right, yeah. So it didn't take long, yeah, let's go ahead and do the 220, and all is good, and before we flip it over, we'll take care of the shiny edges. So we'll sand the flats, then come back and take, just before we flip it over, so, okay, start with the flat.

We've got the bottom sanded out to 220, and so far we've been very diligent about not hitting these, the keel line and the chine lines, with the sandpaper. We left them nice and shiny because they're so easy to sand right through. So now, using the 220, we can just start to, you see that, very quickly smooth that right out. And you can imagine with 60 grp, you know, you would have gone right through. So now we'll just go and hit those, the ke line, shine lines.

So that looks good, good. One thing I thought is just worth pointing out, can you see these patterns here? I do, any thoughts on what that might be? It's hard to, once you wipe it down, they disappear, but if I just sand it, huh, there they appear again. What? So we did a couple fill coats, m, we did a fill coat right after glassing, and then we did another fill coat after we joined everything together. What we're seeing here is we're sanding into this first fill coat, I see. So it's just a slight difference in the hardness or something of those layers of epoxy end up showing up as these little looks kind of like a water stain or something, ex, nothing to worry about, it comes out with the wash, yeah. You know, it's gone.

So yeah, so just just something I thought I'd point out because somebody might see that and say what's going on? So I had a question, yeah. So so we do have patches here in there where you can see weave, y, will that fill in with the, yeah, with the varnish, yeah. So let's, that will go away, yeah. So or to some extent, like right in here. So this happens to be where the double stitch holes are, but you see a little bit of weave pattern right in there where we've sanded into the glass, maybe we even sanded through here, but we're seeing that texture. If I were to take here, I've got a little bit of denatured alcohol. If you can't see it when it's wet with denatured alcohol, you're not going to see it when you put varnish, oh, that's a little trick to know, yeah. What will be visible and what won't, okay?

So we're going to now vacuum the whole thing, just to get this dust off, and we'll, we'll prep to varnish the bottom. There's a couple things we want to do before we do that, but that's the next step of the process. So a couple things before we rish the bottom, we have these grab loop holes here that we glass over at some point. I've got a little counter sync drill here, not sure it'll focus on that, but focus, there it goes, focus, little counter sync drill. So I'm just going to go in into that spot there.

All right, so we access the hole from that side, same thing on the other side. So we want to be able to varnish sort of into that hole a little bit. So instead of keeping it capped off, and then same thing at the other end, but while we're at this end, we've got the skeg slot there. So far we've just been sanding over this as if it didn't exist. Now I'm just going to take and trim back this glass, start by just trimming it back, close a couple layers of tape in there.

So I'm just rasping that flush, that's the axle in there that the, okay, the gagg will pivot on that, clean that surface up around over the edges slightly, just like that, looks good. So eventually we've we made a skeg, but some at some point the skeg will slide in there and the hook will hook on that axle, yep, yeah. So we're going to vacuum it off.

And Bill just suggested the idea of a leaf blower, and that would absolutely get the dust off of here, but it would also make a mess, sh. My feeling with, you know, lots of people want to use an air compressor or something, blow the dust off, you know, it's, comes back, right? It, it's got to land someplace, but it's going to end up on your shop, and some's going to end up on the boat, and we're going to be varnishing shortly, and any dust in the air, some's going to fall on the boat. So you know, I do not have a clean room here by any stretch of imagination, but I don't need purposely throw a lot of dust up into the air. I just like to get all this loose dust that's on the boat off as much as possible with a vacuum, then we are going to wipe it down with denat alcohol, yep, then we're going to wipe it down with a a thinner compatible with the varnish that we're going to use, oh. So and what's the second, why the second step? I want to make sure you know, right now we've been putting our sweaty palms or to get the oil off, yeah, any gunk that's on the boat, and it might not even be a bad idea to wipe it down with water first, oh yeah.

There can be blush from the epoxy that even though we've sanded it, we may have smeared some blush around that cleans up with soapy water. It's a it's a reaction that the epoxy has with humidity that creates a waxy substance, oh, and the waxy substance is called blush, and that will interfere with many varnishes curing well. So I tend to go with the least toxic solvent first, yep, and you know, and if that's good enough, I'll stick with it. So water is a pretty good solvent and generally non-toxic when taken in small quantities, um, then there's denatured alcohol, which will take up a lot of other dirt and so forth. We could probably skip the denatured alcohol if we did water, but it will pick up some gunk that the water doesn't get. And then most of the varnishes recommend a wipe down with their proprietary solvent, whatever it might be, mineral spirits is pretty close to whatever it might be. Some mineral spirits will have a little bit of oil in it. I think it can be a recycled substance and still have some oil in it, so if you read the can, do what the can says unless you know better, simple, who knows better?

And we just vacuum the whole thing down, get rid of the dust. So when you're wiping it down with solvent, I like to make it really wet and wipe it off and try and get a clean part of the rag so we're not just smearing it around, right? We're trying to remove it. So you know, I'll, I'll sometimes just put some right on the boat and then wipe it down and roll your rag, roll the rag around, make it nice and wet, okay, and this is a chance to see if there's any sort of thing visible flaws that you want to do something about, oh it looks so pretty, yeah it does look nice.

And I like to so of go down the whole thing and one long path, just so again I'm picking up any dust that's left behind, yeah, look at that cool, yeah, looks good, yeah. You know, that sanding process is a, it takes a while, but I think it, you know, it produces good results, sure does, yeah.

So the next thing I'm going to do is mask off the deck, hull joint. So I, we're going to varnish the hull, yep, I don't want any drips rolling down onto the deck, right? So by putting a nice line right there, we'll avid that, avoid that. It's a little bit tricky back here because it's so flat underneath here, but we'll get just to the right along the edge there and try not to have the end go up on the other side because where you want the varnish, yeah. And here it's hard to get it stuck down enough, but I'm going essentially right below the shear line. So when I flip it over, I'll go below it again, and we'll have an overlap at the right that at that sheer, so we've wiped it down with ined alcohol, we put the masking tape on, so I'm going to take and wipe it down with a brushing thinner. It's so interlux 3, just that, so interlux 3 just that, so interlux 3. The brand of varnish I'm going to use is interlux, just, you know, there are other brands out there, but that's what I'm using for this, so that's what I'm going to use.

So we're going to have some of this left over from previous projects. I meant to get some new varnish, but I didn't get around to it, so that's fine. We're going to use what we've got.

So I've put this down, I've noticed the reflection change. Most people won't notice that. So I'm just going to go ahead and do it.

And the risk of using the big thing here is we're going to start to grind into the edge here. And I, you know, just because of, see it, just little you're starting to see that the the weave is showing there. So you know, by concentrating on this area a little bit, I can get that down.

So there were some air bubbles in there as as well as, so the sags, and we'll see if the sanding will get down below all that.

So there still some shiny spots, we get some room to go though. That's looking pretty good, really. There were some air bubbles trapped in there, but they're sanded out now, so I'm pretty happy with that, taking care of these last remaining spots here.  

All right, so the the deck's looking pretty good. We just have a few spots left to sort of touch up like I was just doing, and so let's go ahead and do that.  

So I'm pretty satisfied with that. Let's just uh flip it over and look at the hull. So this is pretty good. How it is, and so this is, say I've used a mixture of 60 and 80 grit here, yep.

So from now on on this surface, all we're trying to do is reduce the scratches, just get scratches so the varnish looks nice, nice, yeah. So it levels out nicely, the the 60 grit scratches will throw, show through a bunch of coats of varnish. The finer you get, the fewer coats of varnish you need to hide all scratches, right?

So all right, let's just give, give it a flip over, little more work now and less work later, right, yeah, be basically all the fairing or the level sanding is most of the finish work. The rest of the sanding is just getting rid of the scratches from that, so we're not trying to level things out, we're just going over the already scratched areas and putting different scratches on them until the scratches are so small we can't see them anymore.  

So this has some of these narrow panels here which I was using the long board on, so didn't fit. So we'll just come in with the narrower sanding block, okay, um, and take care of that.

Okay, so we've, we've put in some hard work on this, and we'll quickly go through the grits and get it ready for the first coat.

So I think I'm going to have to decide what the next project will be. I'm not sure if this is the next episode or not. I'm not sure if I'll actually show it or not. But we'll see what we get done until then.

I'm just going to wrap this up. If you haven't already subscribed, go ahead and do that now. And if you enjoy the content, hit the like button and turn on notifications. Until next time, thanks for watching and happy paddling!