Have you ever noticed that quite often something is both an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time?

The current weather is like that right now. The temperature is cool enough that I don't have to worry about getting varnish on fast before it starts to harden but the disadvantage is that it takes longer to harden so I can't put on the coats as fast as before. Previously I could get a coat per day applied.

Take the varnish I put on yesterday. A month ago it would have been fully hard by now, a day later, and I could sand it and put on another coat. But it's still a little tacky today and it may well be tomorrow or the day after before I can continue.

So, instead I did some more varnishing of other things.

Here are two of the seven bottom boards. One is being glued up as it had cracked and the other four are still in the boat as I don't have enough open flat space on which to put the board so that they can be varnished. I'll have to do them two at a time.

The other varnishing I did is not for Naiad at all. We have this Victorian style drying rack for the washing but the battens can leave brown marks on the laundry when you put it over the to dry. So I'm going to apply a few coats of varnish to each one to prevent that happening in future. I tried out one to see how it went and now that I can see that it is covering well I'll make a holder for all six of the battens so that I can varnish them all at the same time. Shouldn't be too difficult as I have screwed in a short screw at each end and can use that to support the batten.

But that will have to wait until another day since I now have wet varnish in the workshop preventing me from doing any construction work for the rest of the day and possibly even tomorrow as well depending on how dry the varnish becomes overnight.

Time for a cup of tea.

[Edit]

I changed my mind and found a way to hang the battens without creating much in the way of dust.

And here is the result. the batten on the left is the one that I varnished this morning and the varnish has completely soaked into the wood.

The supports consist of two pieces of gash plywood with eight holes. Six for the screws in the ends of the battens and two fo the hooks.

Another view of the support. This works quite well and I was able to coat the other five battens in about 20 minutes. It took a lot of varnish to do this the first time as the wood was a bit like a sponge. The second coat should take a bit less. 

These should be ready to re-coat tomorrow along with the pieces to which I applied varnish yesterday.