International 14, epoxy or not?

[Fantasia]

Thank you all as ever for taking the time to reply. It has been very helpful to me to achieve a few decisions:-

I shall not use epoxy for any sort of coating or as a means of bonding the hull stucture together. I might use it in a few localised areas to repair breaks in timber that were always intended to be in one piece.

I would like to increase the moisture content of the timber, so that the joints close up as much as possible, but I am cautious (as ever!) of how I might achieve this. I too have wondered wether to varnish first and then re-hydrate or vice versa. My leaning at the moment is the latter. I could achieve this by total immersion in what we call our olympic sized paddling pool (18 dia.x4ft deep), not sure what the children would think of that though; but my preference at the moment is to build a basic tent around the boat and to increase the humidity within to a high level. The timber would gradually reach equilibrium with its environment and this could be regulated to achieve the desired effect. I might use a mist propogator to increase the relative humidity within the tent. A fungicide might be necessary to control mould growth. Incidentally, that is the reason that salt water is generally recommended over fresh water as salt water will not support fungal growth, not that it is any better effect on rehydration.

I also reject any use of oil or turpentine as a means of feeding or altering the structure of the timber. It does not and I could go into boring detail about that; but will not at the moment. It might have some use as a preliminary coating under "oil" based varnishes. Neither have I understood the reason to thin more that the first coat of varnish when that is applied. I have always had very good results by thinning the first coat perhaps 10% and after that using full strength coats.

I am hoping that the joints will close up a bit and I shall monitor how that occurs. Hopefully, once that has happened, I shall let the timber dry out enough to enable varnishing and then apply the necessary coats fairly quickly. that poses another question: do I varnish the inside first or the outside? Interestingly I have just checked the moisture content of the mahogany and my meter suggests that it averages 13-13.5%, which is higher that I imagined. I might need to make some correction to that figure though, due to the natural salts in the mahogany and as it has probably been saturated in salt water in the past.

I shall keep you posted as this work develops.

[Rupert]

Epoxy is wonderful for fixing bits of wood that weren't meant to be broken, thats for sure!

As for thinning the varnish after the 1st coat, it really is just tomake it flow better, and reduce the likelihood of runs.