Apropos has a lot of bronze and brass parts. The binnacle, 14 opening ports, sampson post caps, and cowl vent plates to name a few. When I bought the boat, EVERYTHING was polished, even the bronze traveller, cowl vent caps, horn cleats, and the rings around the deck prisms. Over the past 10 years I have kept the ports and binnacle polished. The thing about brass/bronze metals, is they begin tarnishing the second you finish polishing. During the summer, I found they stay shiny for a week or two. Any rain speeds up the tarnishing 10x. Salt water causes the metal to go from shiny to dull and green in a few hours. In the spring, when I remove the full boat cover, it would take me about 15 minutes per port, or a couple of hours to polish all the port rings to get them back to shiny. After that and throughout the summer, it would only take about 5 minutes per port. The more often you do it, the less time it takes to remove the tarnish. Over the years I experimented with different polishing products. What I found works best is Flitz Polishing Compound. I apply it by hand using rubber gloves and work it into the metal, then I use a nylon scrub pad to speed up the removal of tarnish (every year or so my mom makes these pads for me, they are the best–thanks mom!). After about 9 years of doing this, I discovered a product called ProtectaClear (www.protectaclear.com) by Everbright that claims to seal and stop the metal from oxidizing and tarnishing. I was skeptical at first, but another Hans Christian owner said it works well for interior and exterior parts. So last fall I decided to apply it to a few exterior brass and bronze parts to see how it would do over the winter. I polished and then applied 2 coats to the 12″ port in the cockpit which is bronze, the top part of the binnacle (brass), and the top of the samson post (brass). 7 months later they are all still shiny. I’ve since applied ProtectaClear to all the remaining ports as well as some interior parts such as the bronze sink faucet, a brass ships bell, and a brass trawler lamp. It also works on other metals such as aluminum and stainless steel. When I refinished a teak/aluminum dinghy engine mount, I removed the chipped paint from the aluminum, polished it, and applied 2 coats of ProtectaClear. Another good thing about ProtectaClear is that it’s self annealing, so you can apply a 2nd coat after the 1st coat dries in about an hour.
Shown below are before and after pictures of a bow port. This is 1 of 2 ports that I didn’t polish regularly because they are harder to reach and they constantly get wet when sailing (sometimes they are underwater when the boat heals over). So it took about 2 hours to remove years of tarnish using Flitz compound on a polishing ball connected to a drill. These 2 ports will be a good test to see how well and how long ProtectaClear works.
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