It's not Ferdy, but it's looking pretty Good(e)

[Todd Bradshaw]

After 35 years of thinking about doing it, I finally decided to paint the old wood strip North canoe that Norm and I cobbled together around 1976. I gotta get it out of my loft so that I have some work space up there, and also so that we can use it while we're still young enough to lift it. Aside from always wondering whether or not I could do a good job on the painting, it gives me a much better UV shield for the resin than varnish would and I'll feel better about leaving it out under a cover.

After dividing the hull into the various panels, base colors were rolled and tipped using Behr one-part urethane/epoxy garage floor paint. Shading was then added with slightly tinted versions of the same paints, sprayed with a Finex HVLP gun. Then I had to build a roller for applying the little bark grain lines. I borrowed a couple of the rubber drums from my spindle sander and covered them with double-stick sailmaking tape. Then I bought a small chunk of a vinyl floor runner that had little ridges molded into the top side. I cut out short sections of individual ridges and covered the drums with them. Add a piece of tubing for the drum to ride on and you have a workable, two-handed grain roller. Darker paint was then rolled out nice and thin on a piece of plexiglass with a regular paint roller. The graining roller was rolled first on the plexi to pick up paint on just the ridges, and then on the hull to transfer it. After it dried, the entire hull was sprayed with a matte finish clearcoat to even out the texture and dull any shine down a bit.

Pitch lines were applied using black urethane calk and spreading it out with a flat stick. They're not perfectly authentic looking, but will do the job and add some texture between the sections. I'm currently repainting all the white using General Finishes "Milk Paint", which is actually an interior/exterior acrylic enamel that has a nice soft, antique-like look when it dries. Once the paint is done, I'll roll the boat over, do some work on the inside, re-wrap the gunwales with better stuff, put the gunwale caps back on and start figuring out how best to get it out of a second story window without tearing up the paint or dropping it.

 

[Andre Cloutier]

Looks wicked. How do you like the Finex product? I'm gonna retire my Binks gun, I'm tired of spraying 60% of the product into the air rather than on the surface, time to go HVLP. What pressure and cfm do you run at?

 

[Mark Neuzil]

Todd, how wide are those bark lines?

 

[Todd Bradshaw]

Andre, I'm using the Finex FX3000 gun with a 1.4mm tip and really like it. It was about $100 from Amazon and well worth the money. I bought it mostly for use on guitars, but it's big enough for medium-sized jobs. I have a couple of high-pressure guns that I hardly ever use any more and a couple of bargain HVLP guns that have the same basic parts as the Finex, they just aren't as precisely built and you can see it in the results. I use the smaller one these days just for spraying waterproofing on fabric and the big one with a 2mm tip for spraying latex on doors, shutters and other house stuff. Anything that has to be a high-quality finish gets sprayed with the Finex. It's listed at 9.5 SCFM @ 29 psi. I just hook it up to the Porter Cable pancake compressor that I bought for my nail guns and it seems to do fine. Typically, I'll set the gun's regulator in the 25-30 psi range when painting.

Mark, the little lines are about 1/16" wide. We found that it was important to maintain a thin film of paint on the plexiglass pick-up plate in order to keep the bark roller's ridges from getting too built-up with excess paint (which would make the printed lines get fat). So, we rolled the plexi with a Gougeon thin foam epoxy roller and my wife was constantly rolling and maintaining the paint on the plexiglass while I was rolling the lines on the boat. I'd generally get about 12"-18" of lines with the 4.5" wide bark roller in a single stroke and then need to re-load it with paint. Then it was just a matter of trying not to be too regular with them and keeping them reasonably parallel. It took us about two hours to roll the entire 22' hull.

My original plan was to paint them one by one with a sign painter's quill, while trying to keep them straight and parallel, so the little bark roller saved me a ton of time and some very tedious work. Here is a photo showing a chunk of the floor mat that I cut up and some of the individual ridges cut from it for the roller, as well as a sample piece of real bark. My faux-bark isn't perfect, but it's pretty close.

 

[Mark Neuzil]

Did you cut the paint or go full strength?

 

[Todd Bradshaw]

Full strength. This epoxy garage floor paint was surprisingly thin (thinner than paints like Easypoxy and Brightside). It took three coats, rolled and tipped, to get an even base over the strip hull. We rolled it with the foam rollers, tipped it with a soft nylon brush and it really dried down to a tight, smooth film on the hull.