Rick,

Any suggestions where to locate the "1 inch" blade you are talking about?

Van...

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-baba-l@ballreich.net [mailto:owner-baba-l@ballreich.net]On
Behalf Of Richard B. Emerson
Sent: Monday, April 17, 2006 8:10 AM
To: baba-l@ballreich.net
Subject: Re: [Baba-L] RE: [baba] Cetol, Bristol, HoneyTeak? - bump

Finish comments:

Cetol: it's a surface coating (Sikkens describes it as "a high solids
alkyd resin") and, in fact, one problem with Cetol is it comes off a
little too easily. That is, chafe will remove it faster than it'll
remove varnish. Doing routine maintenance, 150 sandpaper will take the
coating back to a point where a new set of coats can be added without a
lot of build up. It took me a while to wake up to the fact that the
coating *should* be periodically taken down. Last year, when I did a
full scale clean up, all I needed was a 1" scraper and some 150.
There's a lot of teak on Babas and the job took a while for that reason,
not because Cetol won't come up. Suggesting otherwise is simply
incorrect.

An up side to Cetol is it's extremely easy to apply. Although applying
it on hot wood (baked in the sun) isn't a great idea (the carrier
evaporates too quickly), it can be done. It's not bothered by
humidity. Not only isn't relative humidity not an issue, it can be
rained on while still wet and survive intact. While applying Cetol, as
the last strokes went on, I was caught in a rain shower. I spead a
cover over the work in hopes in minimizing the damage. Afterwards,
expecting total disaster, all I did was wipe up some deposits where
water had beaded and sand off some fuzz left by the cover (oops!).
There was no other damage.

On the matter of appearance: some people like cats, some people like
dogs. Some people like varnish, some people like Cetol. IMNSHO,
discussing boat finish as if it were a religious conviction is, at best,
silly.

Bristol finish: a dock neighbor spent much of one season taking down all
the teak on his Tashiba and recoating with Bristol, only to see it fail
along various joints and splices (e.g., on the cap rail). Worse, the
stuff was extremely hard to get off so it could be properly patched, to
say nothing of being able to clean up the discolored, from the
moisture, wood. Tack on the cost of this stuff and... nice idea but...
I've encountered stories of people who varnished their brightwork to a
gleaming finish and then coated it with epoxy. Works well right up to
the first crack in the epoxy. Bristol finish strikes me as going almost
the same route.

Scraping: Several years ago, we hauled out to start cleaning up OWTW's
teak and I had the clever idea to attack the wood with a 2". Hey,
bigger is better, right? A professional refinisher, working on the boat
next to us, took pity on me and gave me a quick seminar on scraping.
Now I use a 1" scraper and keep a file handy as I work. A sharp (we're
talking s-h-a-r-p!) 1" blade, tuned up every 5-10 minutes, will go
through most finishes at an amazing rate. Essentially, the sharp blade
gets into the finish and the small blade concentrates your weight and
pressure on a smaller area, again cutting through the finish instead of
just wearing it down. A little care is needed to avoid digging into the
wood; the blade will act like a wood plane or draw knife if you're not
careful.

Cheers,
   Rick

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