> Sorry, It's early and my fingers aren't working so well yet. The message
> should read like this... I was having a lot of trouble finding the
> varnishes that you all speak of here so I picked up some Minwax spar
> varnish. It claims it has good UV and water protection. Question: did I
> waste my money? Will this work on a boat? I'm thinking that it will be a
> shorter period of time before i have to re-varnish but that's ok. I live
> in AZ so the sun will be beating the heck out of it anyway and I'm not
> sure that any varnish will be great in these conditions. Will wax on top
> of the varnish give me more protection? Also: how do you know if you have
> UV damage to the epoxy? Does it do obvious things like peal and flake or
> are the symptoms invisible? Thanks in advance for any help given. Paul
> Woolson

I used the Minwax spar varnish on a (System 3) strip built canoe about 9 years ago and had first good results, then bad. I used it for my initial varnishing and it worked great, with excellent flowout and no problems whatsoever. Then 2 years later I decided to recoat, just to take care of a lot of scratches from normal use. The recoat dried very poorly, some of it stayed sticky for about a month. It finally dried but never gave me the gloss that it originally had. I haven't recoated since and it's held up OK, but doesn't look very good. My recommendation is to use what the epoxy manufacturer recomends, or ask them first if you're going to try something new. System 3 recommends Z-Spar which I've used on 3 newer boats and it works as advertised.