Evening out interior colors

G

greenvilleguy

'42 Yankee OTC
Now that I've replaced 20 ribs, 1/3 of the planking, stripped the old paint and bleached the interior; I'm ready to varnish. This morning, I brushed on some mineral spirits just to see the color variation and was shocked. Obviously, I knew their would be some variation, but this is extreme.

I have 3 very distinct ages of ribs and planking and the newer wood is much different in color than the old wood.

Anyone have any suggestions on how I could even out the colors some at this point? Here are some things I could think of, but would be interested if anyone has tried them or has a better solution.
  1. Use Watco walnut oil as a first coat. This would darken all of the wood, but the lighter wood should darken the most.
  2. Use a dye (like TransTint) in the varnish.
  3. Use a semi-transparent deck stain. This would almost be as bad as paint.
  4. Individually stain plank sections to darken them. (Sounds tedious.)
  5. Finish it like it is and be proud of all the different ages and the history each represents. After all, in a hundred years, it should even itself out.
    DSCN0637.JPG
 
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Only thing I can suggest is do not leave it. You'll be happier if you get them dye'd or stained as close as you can. Don't ask how I have come to this conclusion. I use minwax pecan or golden oak mostly. Sometimes darker. Others seem to do better with dyes than stains.
 
Transtint dye mixed with alcohol works really well. Get it at Woodcraft. You get 3 or 4 colors, and dilute in the alcohol, that way you can tweek the tone very quickly. The alcohol allows it to dry fast.
 
Do the best you can with either transtint or solar lux aniline dyes in alcohol. Another thing is that after a year or so the wood will have oxidised enough that you may have a hard time telling what was tinted. Some don't bother tinting at all knowing that in time it will all blend together anyway.
 
I am also a fan of Transtint dyes. I usually just use 1, Honey Amber. I vary the ratio, never using the one in the directions. I also use water as my carrier as I can layer the dye much like painting with watercolors.
 
Please let us know how you decide to proceed. When I finished my first restoration I went the route of leaving the new wood alone. I thought I was satisfied until I had the chance to see other restorations at assembly last summer. Most restorations that I saw there appeared to be stained to match. They were awesome and gave me something to shoot for on the next one. I'm looking forward to pictures of the finished project.
 
Jans right too. I have a canoe that I restored in '85 and you can hardly tell which ribs and planks that I replaced.
 
I'm assuming that I need dye each new plank and each new rib separately w/o getting it on the old ones.

Is there any easy way to do this or do I just need to "paint" each piece being very careful?
 
If you get a dye to match the old wood tones, it isn't really going to darken the old wood further. It is already that color right? I died the whole interior of a canoe once, and it turned out great.
 
Oh wow! Dying the entire interior would be easy enough.

Since this is an OT, it has white cedar ribs and WRC planks so I thinking I will need to dye it all to match the ribs first and then go back and then selectively darken the new planking further.
 
Here are the results. I just dyed the whole interior. I had to use a dark dye because the 70 year old red cedar was so dark (Transtint Reddish brown with a little mission brown added in to soften the red.)

Result: If this was to be a display canoe, the dye should have been applied to the new planking before installing. The dye shade for the new ribs should have been different from the planking to maintain the contrast common to OTCs.

All in all, I'm please with the result for the following two reasons:
1) This particular canoe has been a "working canoe" all of it's life and was never meant to be a museum piece.
2) 70 years of abuse has left the interior pretty dinked up. I'll spend my time making the gunnels, seats, thwarts and decks really shine.
DSCN0633.JPGDSCN0637.JPGDSCN0639.JPGDSCN0640.JPG

The first picture shows what the interior looked like after bleaching, the second one shows what happened when I applied mineral spirits, the third and fourth pictures show the results of dying.
 
Gents, this is a great thread for me. I also have an OT that I've just stripped the paint from (inside) and will have to deal with all of greenvilleguy's same questions. One thing caught my eye though, that being that OT's have red cedar planking. While experimenting with getting rid of the paint I tried a sample patch with fine glass bead (with the expected result), and the planking was just as white as white could be. So now I'm as puzzled as puzzled can be.
Did OT ever use wh. cedar for planking? The canoe appears to have been built somewhere between 1949 - 1960's (no ser.#). Yikes....!
 
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Yep did that more than once. Had to go back and tape off and stain all the new wood. Now before installing any new ribs or planking I stain it. My mix is minwax golden oak, a touch of walnut, and a little red oak. Somtimes it needs lightened with some natural. I oil (boiled linsed) an old plank (removed from boat) to match the color. When I am all done I put a little of this stain in the oil/spirits mix to blend the rest of the canoe...
 
As to the cedar many of the earliest canoes were white cedar planked. You can see in the boat of the 1900's and in the teens some of the canoe planking got narrower. The wide white cedar planks got harder to find and finally in the teens somewhere they switched to western red. Even after the switch in the CS grades some AA gades had white cedar planking...
 
Canoeal said:
finally in the teens somewhere they switched to western red
Click to expand...

My research indicates that western red cedar was in common use from the earliest known Old Town Canoe Company records. A portion of their inventory from September 30th, 1908 at http://forums.wcha.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=7595&d=1242342933 shows 42469 board feet of "Western Cedar on hand" at the bottom of the image with various amounts of local white cedar ribs, planks, and logs above it. This came from a company ledger that has entries for Western or red cedar from 1905 to 1932. The information at http://forums.wcha.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=18732&d=1322443967 has more details about their use of both types of cedar in the 1930s. Old Town always tried to use white eastern cedar for their ribs and red western cedar for the planking when available.

Benson
 
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Next time try this. First, remove the planking you want too replace. Second, strip the interior varnish. Leave the broken ribs in place but don't bother stripping them. Third, sand and varnish only the old wood with one coat of varnish. Fourth, replace the broken ribs and previously removed planking. Fifth, stain the new wood to match the old varnished wood. The stain won't be accepted by the varnished wood so a perfect match is easy.
 
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