My wife and I started stripping the topside of our boat this weekend. Couple of issues have cropped up.
Okay, first oddity!
There is a piece of wood that doesn't seem to match. Not sure if its a difference in stain or what. Take a look, I am halfway wondering if this boat hasn't been repaired with standard marine plywood. (pictures to come)
Citri-strip did a great job of stripping the finish.
The other potential issue here is that it appears that the PO actually sanded off the varnish before painting.... so there is paint in the grain pretty badly. How the heck do I get it out short of sanding like crazy? It looks like there is lots of paint left on the boat in photos but its scraped as best as we could without gouging the wood.
What grit would I start with here?
The boat IS wet in these photos, I rinsed it off and it hasn't dried yet.
Well I'll look into how to remove the paint but if your deck is a plywood veneer you have to be very careful, I would recommend doing it by hand. If you use a power sander of any sort you'll be sorry before you can say "I didn't mean too."
The other guys may have another idea but i've heard of bleaching the wood. But I don't know if this would help with paint. I'll look into it...Dan
Another idea I had was to again use a solvent but do you think you could scrub it out with a heavy nylon bristle brush? You may have to put on a lot of solvent to get it to loosen up. Just a thought...Dan
Dan, I think the brush is a good idea. I did sand some of it with a palm sander tonight and getting through the painted grain is easy but seems to remove about half of the veneer. I think it is a matter of getting it as clean as possible before sanding.
I would try 3Ms safe stripper... and use a nylon stiff brush... also try the least coarse Scotch Brite pad you can find...
Then when the paint is out, you can use wood bleach (Oxalic acid I believe).. apply heavier and leave on longer where there are dark spots, and overall lightly, to make the wood look as new as possible.
The bleach will cause fibers to loosen so you will need to sand after that.
I did not use any power sanding on my deck, to make sure I didn't have things get away from me... I used 150 for quite a while, and maybe nothing coarser than that... If I did use 100 grit, it was only in certain areas.
Who knows, perhaps the filler stain you use, may cover up some of the minute traces of leftover paint.
The pieces of plywood on the deck are the correct elevations and configurations/sizes. If some has been replaced from factory original, whomever did it replaced them exactly how they should be.They may not have used the same type of plywood species however.
The colour variation may just be plain and simple the natural differences in wood grainand texture and density from one tree to another.
The 30 degree angle cut between the plywood at the deck and the gunwale covering board is correct too.
Good to know Andreas. I think I am going to just have to keep cleaning to see if I can get the grain to match up on the gunwales. If not, I may have to replace them. One thing I won't be able to live with is a huge color mismatch there.
Sometime its nice to have varience in your colors of wood. It is what sets us apart from the fiberglass or paint crowd. In fact thats probably why it was painted in the first place. Once you varnish it all it could look really stunning and quite unique. I like the look of a strip canoe with different tones, vs a all look alike kind. Well whatever happens i'm sure it will look great. Dan
