Having 9 to 10 cars on our classic car rental fleet we now have reached happens where we will probably re-furbish at least one of them annually. This season it was time for the 1961 Jaguar Mk2. It visited the bodyshop in January to have a few rust bubbles at the bottoms from the doors fixed, several small bits of welding and a respray. The issue with this is that the interior can then look tatty in contrast. Therefore we ordered a new set of interior panels and chose to re-furbish the woodwork.
Jaguar Mk2s have almost as much woodwork as a small dining room, with veneered door cappings on all four doors, the dashboard gauges set in wooden panels and also the dashboard top is an extremely heavy piece of hard wood, veneered to complement the doorway cappings. I have re-furbished wood trim in classic cars before so decided to this by hand, myself.
Our woodwork had a slightly odd feature which made it uncertain simply how much work could be needed. Underneath the varnish it had been clear the wood cappings on the two front doors and also the dashboard top had some of the wood grain painted onto it. Slightly worried that I will dsicover great chunks of veneer missing and achieving been replaced by lots of painted filler, I very gingerly removed all the varnish with Nitromors paint stripper.
I have used this before after i re-furbished the woodwork in our MG RV8 a few years so knew that it is good at taking out the varnish without attacking the veneer. After several applications of Nitromors, with careful scraping, finished off with a final application being rubbed off with wire wool, I was left with bare wood. All of the painted grain had disappeared but all the veneer is at good shape, with no sections missing. I came to the conclusion the Nz sun (in which the Mk2 had spent the majority of its life) had bleached the varnish and rather than strip it all off, an earlier owner had painted wood grain onto the varnish after which varnished outrageous.
Relieved that I did not have to go to the expense of having it all re-veneered Then i proceeded to varnish it. When I re-furbished the MG RV8 woodwork back in 2003 I used a spray polyurethane varnish which gave a very good finish. I used exactly the same approach and even the same tin of varnish which was still in my garage. The very first handful of coats sprayed on OK, although I’d a few small runs appear. I sanded these down and applied another coat. No problem. The tin of varnish depleted, I purchased another handful of tins of the same product and added another coat.
Disaster
The brand new coat of varnish attacked the varnish I had already applied and it all wrinkled similar to the ‘crackle’ finish paint on our MGB. I suppose that either the manufacturer has changed the recipe for his or her solvent, or even the solvent in my old tin had gone off, and the two solvents attacked each other.
To the Nitromors and it all came off again back to bare wood. I thought it worth trying another tack and decided to use brush on varnish instead so bought a tin of Ronseal quick drying interior varnish. I have used Ronseal products before for domestic applications and always achieved good results. A part of my logic was also that if any runs did appear i quickly could brush them out before the varnish hardened and thus take away the chance of runs and the have to sand the woodwork down all over again.
I had been doing all of this during February and also the garage is too cold for varnish as it needs to applied at temperatures well over 10C, and so i painted all four door cappings at room temperature in the kitchen. The Ronseal varnish is water, is a milky white in the tin, but should dry clear to the required finish. I gave all door cappings a single coat of Ronseal and even though it didn’t run, it showed several brush marks. Normally as varnish dries the top tension resolves this as it pulls out all of the marks. However brushed over the freshly varnished door cappings to help the procedure.
Disaster
The fast drying varnish was virtually dry after only 10 minutes and as I brushed the varnish it went all lumpy and grainy. Additionally, it never went clear, drying to a slightly milky colour.
Back to the Nitromors to strip it all off again. This time around the stripper and water varnish turned to mush and was extremely hard to remove. Eventually all removed and cleaned to bare wood I returned to Plan A – spray varnish.
This time around using just the new tins of varnish and spraying it on in extremely thin coats, about 10 in all and leaving the varnish to harden at room temperature, I achieved an appropriate finish. The top is extremely smooth, the wood grain clear and vibrant and it is now possible to see the front door cappings are mirror images of each other, much like the trunk pair and also the dashboard veneer is a mirror image right and left.
So plenty of work, but well worth it. The inside of our Jaguar Mk2 now appears to be good as the freshly painted exterior.
Lessons learnt
Spray varnish is better for such applications that brush on varnish.
Don’t use old tins of varnish, even if they don’t have a use before date around the tin.
Spray it on as thinly as possible, leave they are driving at room temperature.
Then do it again, and over and over.