Polyurethane?

[Tom W.]

So does anybody use it on boats? I did a search on the forum for discussion about polyurethane, but found little.
I tried Minwax "spar urethane", on my spars to see how it holds up. I was wondering if anybody else had experience with it.

[Jase]

Yep, I used it this yr on the boom, gaff and bowsprit, seems to be holding up exceptionally well.

[James McMullen]

I used it on some backyard furniture--but not on any of my boats. The problem seems to be not that it doesn't hold up well for a while, but that when it finally does fail and needs to be repaired and recoated it is substantially more of a hassle to refinish. The adirondack chairs I made had to be stripped down to bare wood using some aggressive belt sanding--a lot of work compared to refinishing something with regular spar varnish. I wouldn't use spar urethane on something I had spent a great deal of time carefully and delicately shaping because of the trauma it would endure when it came time to refinish could quite likely tear it up.

I think a good analogy is like how you use something like dolphinite rather than 3M 5200 when bedding deck hardware, not because the 5200 wouldn't do a good job in the short term but because it will be so unpleasant to have to fix later down the road.

[Frank Wentzel]

I seem to recall someone on the Forum who called Minwax about a year ago on using thier Helmsman Spar varnish on thier boat and was told it was not made for use on boats.

/// Frank ///

[Tom W.]

Interesting, Frank, too bad about the label, "spar..."
Thanks, you guys, I'll report back with results.

[Don Z.]

"Helmsman"
"Spar"
"Varnish"

Now, why would I think something like that would be useful around a boat?

[RonW]

Here is polyurethane being used on a transom..

http://www.nexusmarine.com/odysy_launch.html