hard clearcoat

That close up pic is stunning. You would swear you can see real grain pits and the joint looks like it was really mended together, dam that's talent. Way to capitalize on your skill set.
Can't imagine all those folks with their faces planted in it just staring into it trying to figure out if it was real wood or not. Nice job Jim.
 
Jim C said:
well its not necessarily cheaper. atleast for the table. the tables probably cost more but the toe rails and the transoms are definitely far cheaper than doing a real one. you have to remember that teak is extremely expensive and very hard to get. then you have the countless hours for a woodworker to make the toe rail then on top of that the teak has to have a finish put on it. once you have a nice beautiful real teak toe rail on your boat then you need to maintain it. it usually requires it to be stripped and refinished every 2 years or so. take boat like a 55ft viking. a real teak toe rail might cost somewhere around $45k to have it installed and finished. then a strip and refinish every 2 years at about $10k. the reason i have become so busy with faux wood is simply on the maintenance side. there is none. i do this for a garage door manufacturer as well. everyone wants wood look outside but no one want to deal with the maintenance.
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That makes sense, Jim. I hope they are paying dearly for it!
 
Curious as to what type of paint do you use for the wood grain effect? I would imagine you would need something at least automotive grade.
 
for the base color i use utech ss. that has to go down first, sit overnight then sand the next day. i need something chemical resistant because all the grain work is spi intercoat with wanda base mixed into it to give some color. I'm using brushes and different things so just putting a basecoat down initially would just rewet everything and mix it all together. everything is very transparent so very little wandabase into alot of intercoat. there is a candy i put over everything to tone the color a little and that is spi intercoat with candy dyes added. once the art is all done i have been using spi speed clear. there is about a 3-4 month window over the summer where i cannot use the speed clear and i go back to universal. its so hot and humid right now that i cannot keep the speed clear from solvent popping really bad. universal right now works great. as soon as it cools off a little then i switch back to the speed clear. for the garage doors i do graining on, that is a completely different process. the doors get white spi sealer, sanded then a thin coat of spi epoxy to make it ready for the grain. all the grain and topcoat on those is done with a waterbase paint from aquasurtech. the grain on those look completely different. on the doors i can do all the heart grain and make different grain patterns where on the boats i am limited to just straight grain because i am using solvent paint on those and the way its done.
 
no problem and thanks! this forum is loaded with tons of talent and each seem to have their own specific niche which is why this is a great place to find good info. there is always someone here that specializes in the specific questions that someone has.
 
Jim, had a door repair job at local surf shop this week, so took a close up look at their surfboard inventory. Some you could see a pink or blue cast to the clear resin, but most were clear & didn't scratch with a little fingernail scuffing & pressing. Some with wood veneer inserts showed a little mapping up close to the trained eye, but most looked clear with depth. They no longer had an in house board repair dude to talk to , but from what I saw, I'll definitely sample some clear poly surfboard resin someday.

To everyone else here, I've done a little playing here & there with faux woodgraining over the years. I have a pretty fair understanding of it now, which definitely includes knowing how much dedication it would take to go from ok on sample boards occasionally to doing it on real products at a fast enough pace to do it for a living.
For anyone wanting to do a little play sampling, Old Masters gel stain would be a good starting point.
I got several factory premixed samples of Aquasurtech stains & tinted topcoats a couple years back & got in a few hours of practice before my company moved & decided not to buy a spray booth. Cool product for it's applications & Jim is most likely the most skilled artistic user of the brand & probably still the only person they sell it untinted to.
Here's a couple of my amateur samples from 2 years ago, which would have never happened without Jim. Had this idea in my head for years of doing hot rod flames as the look of a natural wood growth, but that would take some effort to hone in on a new technique.
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Jim C said:
Here is a closeup of the before clear so you can see the actual grain. This is on a toe rail, not the table.

View attachment 16034
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This is astonishing work! There's a lot of detail going on here. Thank you so much for the detailed information!

I know this is a dated thread but I'm hoping I can ask a couple of questions of Jim C. Do you activate the intercoat clear? Also, do you reduce your clear/base mix? And if so, do you use a very slow reducer for brushing? If you're doing transoms this way, I am assuming that this holds up to the marine environment.

I used clear epoxy with universal clear over the mahogany woodwork on my small sailboat and it's held up great for years, well except where I ding it.… Plenty of touchups, with occasional light sanding and overcoat for maintenance. Maybe I would try a faux wood transom, for fun. Or, because the mahogany is a bit bleached out now, maybe I could make it look like teak! :)
 
there are a few different layers going on there. all are done with lightly tinted intercoat clear which i do activate. it is all reduced to different degrees. some layers more than others and i always use slow or very slow reducer.

on your real wood, epoxy with clearcoat over it is the only way to go imo. how well it holds up depends on the boat really. many boats flex too much an joints in the wood will make a little crack in the finish causing moisture to get in then the finish begins to fail. most boats get about 2 years out of a real wood finish before it all needs to be stripped down and refinished. this can easily get into the 5 figure range at a boat yard. this is wy the faux is so popular anymore. that and the cost of real teak is just insane.
 
Jim C said:
there are a few different layers going on there. all are done with lightly tinted intercoat clear which i do activate. it is all reduced to different degrees. some layers more than others and i always use slow or very slow reducer.

on your real wood, epoxy with clearcoat over it is the only way to go imo. how well it holds up depends on the boat really. many boats flex too much an joints in the wood will make a little crack in the finish causing moisture to get in then the finish begins to fail. most boats get about 2 years out of a real wood finish before it all needs to be stripped down and refinished. this can easily get into the 5 figure range at a boat yard. this is wy the faux is so popular anymore. that and the cost of real teak is just insane.
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Thanks Jim! I very much appreciate the info.

The wood trim on my old boat is the coaming around the cockpit, applied to a fiberglass boat. I totally encapsulated those pieces with epoxy. Fortunately, there are no real joints finished over, they're only butted against each other. The boat used to be soft and flexible… But I got silly and stiffened it up with half-inch structural foam with triaxial glass each side… Though the boat stays in the water all summer, it is covered. 13 years so far with annual touchups… Way better than spar varnish!

Thanks again!
 
i havent used anything different as of yet. i have only done a couple tables since this thread. so far instead of doing 4 coats of clear as usual, i am doing 2 coats, cooking the crap out of it under a curing lamp for about 10 hours, blocking flat then 2 more coats, cure it again then sand and buff. it just helps get the clear harder that way. if i ended up doing alot of these then i would probably end up trying that nason clear.
 
Jim, the hardest clears I ever used were Transtar clears. Specifically Hi-Gloss (6861) Nason was like Universal compared to it. This was 20 years ago but I doubt it has changed.
 
Thanks chris. I am really hoping these dont becone a thing. I made my concerns clear to the company. Once in a blue moon i dont mind doing a table for them but if i end up doing one every two weeks then i will be looking for a super hard clear. Doing it the way i am now works but it just takes way too long.
 
I just use conversion varnish for my wood projects, it gets really hard in hours.
Much easier to work with.
There's a 2K poly made for wood that professionals use that's suppose to be even better.
 
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jcclark said:
I just use conversion varnish for my wood projects, it gets really hard in hours.
Much easier to work with.
There's a 2K poly made for wood that professionals use that's suppose to be even better.
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Yeah all faux in auto basecoat. Needs an automotive clear. I ise conversion varnish as well. Fantastic stuff. Good for interior only though. Falls apart outside unfortunately
 
Sherwin made something called graphiti additive or something like that, supposed to make any clear really hard from what I understand.
 
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