Quick opinions re. color matching

mmmalmberg

LOVES Wooden Canoes
Just put first dilute coat of Epiphanes on the gunnels. On the rest of the boat I'd given a first coat of b.l.o. and I think it made it somewhat yellower. I'd like to get it just a little closer, as the Epiphanes is reddish and it needs some yellow to make it closer.

The question is, a coat of b.l.o. or a coat of orange shellac?

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I had great success in using amber shellac. I built up the layers to get a nice rich colour and then finish with a satin varnish which gives a lovely finish. Experiment on a scrap piece first. I love using shellac as a base beneath varnish

Nick
 
Me too. So I should probably give the first coat a day or two to dry before the shellac I suppose... I just want to be sure not to slow the hardening of the varnish.
 
Part of the beauty of wooden canoes is in the different woods used in their construction. Your ribs vs. planking, for example… Why strive to make it all uniform? Also, as you may remember from finishing the interior, one thinned coat of varnish looks radically different from multiple coats. My personal opinion, for what it’s worth - don’t get complicated. Build up varnish and let it be beautiful, showing off the complimentary colors of red cedar, white cedar, spruce, and maybe other woods.
 
But you need to use de-waxed shellac if you intend to cover it with a layer of varnish, right? Otherwise the varnish will just peel off (been there, done that). The only de-waxed shellac I know of is Zinsser's Seal Coat, but they claim it goes on clear. So... what shellac are you folks using?
 
Part of the beauty of wooden canoes is in the different woods used in their construction. Your ribs vs. planking, for example… Why strive to make it all uniform? Also, as you may remember from finishing the interior, one thinned coat of varnish looks radically different from multiple coats. My personal opinion, for what it’s worth - don’t get complicated. Build up varnish and let it be beautiful, showing off the complimentary colors of red cedar, white cedar, spruce, and maybe other woods.
I haven't tried to make anything uniform, including all the spliced-in repairs on ribs, planking and inwales. But I've given the same treatment to all the wood so far - BLO followed with varnish, and that shifts all the wood colors in the same direction. On the gunwales I forgot the BLO and so I'm just looking to bring it into parity with everything else - not making it the same color, but the same color relative to itself if that makes sense.
 
But you need to use de-waxed shellac if you intend to cover it with a layer of varnish, right? Otherwise the varnish will just peel off (been there, done that). The only de-waxed shellac I know of is Zinsser's Seal Coat, but they claim it goes on clear. So... what shellac are you folks using?
So, yikes. I've used cans of Zinsser shellac (amber & clear) from the hardware store, under different finishes on several projects recently, hope I don't have trouble down the road.
 
Maybe safest is a coat of blo. I don't need to over-think it...

By the way, I just read you can put a de-waxed shellac over regular shellac. That would possibly be a way to use amber under oil. Also the couple quick reads I saw just now said that the wax interferes with adhesion of polyurethane and water-based varnishes. So maybe natural oil varnish is not a problem??

I used canned Zinsser shellac under some brushed lacquer recently on some cabinetry and that seemed to work fine (puckered slightly on application but dried down perfect).
 
Done - I gave it a coat of BLO. Pretty minimal change but in the right direction. It did however make the most important difference, that being the psychological one:)
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By 'BLO' I assume you mean boiled linseed oil. I'm curious: how long after applying BLO must you wait before applying varnish? I'm thinking it has a much longer dry time than varnish.
 
Nick, I share your issue with the slots, Ya. But as most of the boats I have done are hard wood for the outwales and mostly hardwood for the inwales. The consequence of this seems to be that if I want the heads to be barely below the surface and appropriately tight, I could never get those number 10s to get to horizontal predictably . So I always lived with the finish random slot for a beautiful smooth head placement. Then you got me to thinking if I were to back out the screw and start again with the screw in a different slot position to try to adjust to the final slot position , maybe the need for Nick sanity can be met. Maybe in my next life I will perform the well designed experiment and submit for peer review. I can't believe I went there.

Howie, et al. I have never used boiled linseed but rather Raw and only when the interior is ready for finishing. It is an old McGrievey treatment, and I have never had a varnish issue with the interiors after 3-5 coats. The final coloration is something else.
Dave
 
Straighten and line up those screw slots please; its doing my OCD in :) !!

Nick
Ha! Well we just have different OC's:) I like to tighten them to a perfect tightness and I go back and check them several times to make sure they're all where I like them. IN fact, many of the screw hole countersinks were originally so far sunken into the wood that I filled ALL the holes with G-Flex/sawdust and re-drilled them and re-countersunk them so that I could tighten them the way I like:)

Beyond that, the bow tip, with the most initial damage and having received new inwale tips and a new outer stem, came out about 1/4" off what I believe to have been the original tip location. This meant I had that much extra outwale to work with, which allowed me to clean up both ends of the original outwales. In order to distribute the excess to both ends, I plugged all the original screwholes in the ribs/inwales and drilled all new holes to move the outwales back 1/8". This also gave me fresh holes to tighten those randomly rotated screws into:)
 
By 'BLO' I assume you mean boiled linseed oil. I'm curious: how long after applying BLO must you wait before applying varnish? I'm thinking it has a much longer dry time than varnish.
Yeah, I didn't mean cocaine or anything:) Yes I think it's much slower to harden, but my understanding is it's more a process of oxidation and chemical transformation of a sort rather than drying.

OK Speaking of which, what to me is also slow-drying is Epiphanes. And it doesn't ever seem to dry very hard. Coats I put on last year are still not hard like I'd expect, i.e. dragging a fingernail across it will leave a mark. And that's about five medium coats with a week or more between coats, close to a year ago. Anyway...
 
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