A step backwards

Compared to the success achieved the previous day with the varnish, what should have been a relatively quick and simple job of painting the prop tips yellow turned out to be a nightmare. The problem was that the ‘universal’ undercoat that I sprayed on as a base coat reacted like paint stripper with the yellow finish that was already there and caused it to bubble up.

This is not uncommon and usually happens when you don’t know the provenance of a finish that someone else has applied, as now. After cutting the prop tips down and rubbing down the bare wood to get it totally smooth, I’d then given the whole prop a coat of clear varnish. I’d then masked off the tips and applied a final, second coat of varnish to the rest of the prop before reversing the masking and lightly rubbing down the tips and giving them a light spray of undercoat as a uniform base for the new yellow finish.

In rubbing the tips down, I’d broken through the thin coat of varnish that I’d previously applied in one or two places exposing the old yellow finish that was already there and it seems that it was in those areas that the problem occurred. When something like this happens, there’s nothing else to do other than stop, allow everything to harden off and repair the damage.

The best way to do that is to isolate the affected areas and fix them with a material that’s inert to both the old and new finishes and will act as a barrier, and luckily I had such a product in my ‘atelier’ in the form of a special water-based ‘sous-couche bois’ (wood undercoat). It also had the advantage of having thickened over time so I could apply it quite thickly locally to build the levels of the damaged areas back up again without it running all over the place.

It’s been a slow but successful process and there were just a couple of small areas that needed re-doing this morning before rubbing them down again and moving on to where I’d hoped to be yesterday. Here’s a shot showing what I’m talking about.

Unfortunately, these lttle set-backs always happen and you just have to be patient and work through them. In comparison, I cut and bent the new door tubes the day before yesterday with excellent results and they painted up fine yesterday despite its being a damp, dull day. So at least I can now move on and finish fabricating the Weedhooper’s new doors.