Stain

As mentioned in a previous post, my first coat of varnish on this build failed to ever cure. As it happens this was fortuitous since I wasn’t really fond of the natural color of the spars. Since I needed to eliminate the epoxy substrate as the cause of the tacky varnish, I was going to be sanding the spars back down to bare wood. This gave me an opportunity to stain them if I wanted.

I have very little experience with staining wood. Nor do I match colors well. And after a bunch of coats of resin and varnish, it’s not easy to go back if you don’t like the result. But what the hell…

I bought four different colors of the Mohawk Ultra Penetrating stain recommended by CLC. And as you can imagine, applied on scrap wood the color is nothing like the color you see on the manufacturer’s brochure.

Here are the 4 colors I tested…

Since the stain is pretty easy to sand out of bare wood, I applied a section of each of these to my mast. Without applying epoxy and varnish I wasn’t getting the complete look but it was good enough.

In the end I stained all my spars with Thistle and am very pleased. I stained the doubler and upper cleat on Bulkhead #2 with the Lt. Golden Oak.

Note that the spars are also finished with a satin varnish, not gloss. Doubler and cleat are gloss.