Varnish Experiment

Haven't posted in a couple weeks. Haven't finished roughing in the taper on those four blanks yet. Time has been limited lately. I'll wrap that up tomorrow night and move on to the final planing. I've had a little experiment going on the side. I've saturated all but one of my finished rods in Mike Brooks stuff. I've been curious to know how much weight I'm adding to the blanks versus a dipped finish. Also, I'd like to know if saturating the blanks with a varnish solution improves moisture resistance. So...I've soaked some sample strips to compare. There are four sets of sample strips. They were all flamed and heat treated. The saturated samples were heat treated immediately before soaking them. There are four sets of test strips. The first set was not finished. The second was soaked in straight Ship'n Shore for 24 hours. The third set was soaked in the Mike Brooks recommended combination of 3 parts SnS, 1 part spar varnish and 1 part turpentine. The last set was dipped in Ace spar varnish 4 times about 8 hours between dips and dried in the drying closet with a combination and heat and UV light. I weighed them before and after finishing. The average weight gain of all three finished sets was about 5%. That's consistent with anecdotal comments I've heard or read somewhere. The saturated sets took on a warm amber tone after soaking. The amber tone of the dipped strips is a little darker. So now for the moisture testing. I'm going to wait till this weekend to give the dipped strips a little more time to cure. I'll submerge them all in water and weight them at timed intervals. Stay tuned... Oh...by the way. That little cup in the pictures has a piece of fully cured Titebond III in it. That's what I use to glue up the blanks. I wanted to know how the glue would hold up to low temp (175 degrees) heat treating immediately before soaking the blanks in the varnish solution. The test strips had already been heat treated. I cooked them at 175 degrees for an hour to drive off any reacquired free water before soaking them in the solution. The glue sample went in the oven with them. It held up just fine. It did soften slightly, but it didn't melt or deform in any way. If I decide to heat the glued up blanks before soaking, I'll probably bind them first just in case. Not sure about that yet.