Okay, 22 days and counting until the offical start of hurricane season. Everything is ready except for the plywood window covers. Can anyone recommend a good paint/varnish/chemical goo to make the plywood waterproof?

Thanks in advance.
-Blast

Marine varnish? If it's good enough for boats, it should be good enough for hurricanes.

Sue

Marine poly... but it's expensive and has horriffic vapors.

APA says use an oil-based primer, paying special attention to edges (and knots if you want to prevent bleed-thru), then use a good quality acrylic latex exterior house paint over the oil-based primer (makes sense).

The primer doesn't take all that long to dry. The acrylic latex house paint can take a while if you put it on too thick, and in my experience, it can be "sticky" for a long time - like if you stack plywood sheets flat on top of each other. However, it works rather well. Marine Polyurethane is the only other exterior stuff I've used on plywood that really holds up to wet, UV, etc. but I no longer care to bother with the darned fumes from it.

HTH

Tom

AFAIK, they make marine plywood which uses waterproof glue...

-john

To really seal it, get some marine epoxy (West system or other), hardener, and thinner. Thin the epoxy to almost water consistency and saturate the plywood on all sides and edges (including hole edges). You wont have to put any cloth or mat on it, just the epoxy. If you are going to store these outside, it would be worth giving them a coat of compatible paint as epoxy is somewhat sensitive to UV.

Regards,
Bill

Well, any exterior grade plywood (which is what he should use, of course) has waterproof glue. Marine plywood is more expensive than even cabinet grade plywood because it must have no core or edge voids, usually more plys than ordinary plywood, fully plugged knots on faces, etc. It's more of a structural distinction than a glue distinction - they may even use the same glue as ordinary exterior grade plywood.

The APA site has more information than most of us need/want. http://www.apawood.org/

Additional Info here, perhaps: http://www.canply.org

Regards,

Tom