Serendipidy
Sometimes life throws you lemons. Sometimes you get to make lemonade! :yes:
So the rain has stopped, enough for the wind to blow 30+ MPH. A bit hard to paint in that. But I have perservered. There are two coats of primer on the deck, and the topside is completely sanded so the first coat of primer can be added to that. The first coat of polyurethane has been put on the locker and cabin covers. All is (almost) right with the world.
What about serendipity? Well, this weekend, on Saturday, it was raining. After it finished, Erik and I headed out to do some sanding. I had purchased wet/dry sandpaper. But, naive as I was, I assumed that meant you could sand something that was wet. Duh! What it means is that you can keep the sandpaper wet, you can keep the surface wet, and the job goes much more quickly. I’m guessing it’s because the sandpaper doesn’t get gummed up as quickly, since you can keep washing it off. Nevertheless, I don’t hate sanding as much as I did now that I’ve made this discovery. The serendipity came in because I probably wouldn’t have discovered this if it hadn’t been raining so much.
Okay, so I went back to Don Casey’s book and he said to use wet sandpaper. He also suggested having a spray bottle to keep the surface moist. I actually found it more helpful to keep the sandpaper moist.
Second bit of knowledge gained was more of a thankful oops! When I finished putting the primer on the covers, I neglected to put the cover back on the paint can. Half a quart of $30 primer sat uncovered for two days. When I came back to it, there was no film on the paint, and it didn’t look like it had evaporated too much. Sigh of relief!
Funny thing is that the primer does dry fairly quickly when it’s applied to a surface. Interesting chemistry. I wonder what the mechanism is.
I talked with Mike at Wormley Creek. When I showed him the engine compartment and told him I was thinking the best place to put the battery bank (400 lbs of AGM batteries) would be aft, where the diesel tank had been. He suggested it might actually be better to put them as far forward as possible. He explained that you actually want your weight to be as close to the keel as possible. Besides, he said, that way it was easier to get the batteries in and out. Made sense. We’ll wait until the batteries and engine actually get here to put it all together.
I’d already heard about boat bucks. They’re about $1000 apiece, and it’s how one measures boat projects. Recently, I also heard about boat days. They equal one week. At this point, it looks like my ‘projects’ on this boat are going to be extended about one boat day.
Deck and Topside Painting
I hate sanding. It seems like an endless job. Especially on the deck of a boat, with all its nooks and crannies. But the deck and topside of 4 Degrees needed painting. Between 30+ years of dings, repair of a soft spot that left lots of stains, and stains from either the gasoline outboard or the power plant next door to my marina, the deck and topside (sides of the boat above the waterline) were looking pretty sad.
I had requested that the boat be hauled out mid-March, in order to get it painted before the new engine arrived. Because, obviously, I didn’t want lots of footprints in the cockpit while trying to paint it.
So the boat was hauled out. And I started patching all the dings and all the small holes in the deck that were causing water to appear in the cabin. We then started sanding down the whole thing. I rented the vacuum sander from the marina, a requirement for their environmentally friendly facility. But there were a lot of surfaces that weren’t large or flat enough on the deck that didn’t lend themselves to that tool. I did have a small palm sander (‘give me the cheapest thing you have’, I asked the folks at TruValue) with a bag for dust. But it, too was a bit large to use. So alot of surfaces had to be hand sanded.
Back up a minute….
I had alot of epoxy from the soft spot repair left over. It said it was good for filling deck crazing. So I mixed up the last of what I had and brushed it on the crazing on the toe rail. But the stuff was quite runny. What I did was make more of a mess than a fix to the situation. All those drips had to be sanded off. Not only that, I guess I didn’t mix it all consistently, because alot of sections just flaked off.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled program. 🙂
The nooks and crannies around the hardware needed to be hand sanded, as did the sides of the toe rail. Not alot of surface area, per se. But it took the longest to do.
But we finally finished the sanding. And it started raining.
Last year, I was out of work for 3 months. It made it hard to afford supplies for boat repairs. But it did allow for alot of time to get work done. Now, I have a job, with a 1-1/2 hour ride to and from work. So I have the money for the repairs, but not alot of time to work on it.
So, sanding needed to be done, I looked to get some painting done. Unfortunately, it rained all day last Saturday and most of Sunday. So I watched the NOAA hour by hour report. When it said the rain would be done (although the sky was still very much overcast), I headed back to the boat, and worked on some more of the sanding. Since I’m paying for the time this boat is sitting out of the water (in addition to the slip fees), I sent a note to my bosses letting them know that I’d be taking off early from work on Monday and Tuesday.
Monday, things happened and I didn’t leave as early as I’d hoped I would. But I did finish the sanding and get the taping done. By then, however, the shadows were appearing, so I put off painting until the next night.
Tuesday, I started painting as soon as I arrived.
I had read that the best technique to use was something called ‘roll and tip’: you roll the paint vertically, then you smooth the paint by brushing it horizontally. A friend suggested that she had used a foam brush with good success. Since I was starting on the bow, and on the toe rail, I figured I’d try a foam roller and see how it did. I was not impressed: the results were more ‘bumpy’ than I wanted. I had less success with a foam brush. So I changed to a regular brush, figuring I was going to have to sand it and put a second coat of primer on anyway.
But the top of the cabin was a different story. the surfaces were large enough, and the paint dried fast enough, that it was hard to get a good layer on with a brush. So I switched to a roller for a modified ‘roll and tip’. It worked pretty well! The only downside was the fact that the roller was a nappy one and the ‘hairs’ got caught in the paint. Looks like those will have to be sanded out, too.
Which is very frustrating.
I’d washed the entire outside of the boat, then wiped the surface to be painted down with acetone. I then rewiped it with acetone before starting to paint, to get rid of the dirt that had blow on. So now, to have something end up in the paint from the roller was very disconcerting. I will definitely pick up some foam rollers for the rest of the job.
I started having shadows by the time I got to the cockpit. But I finished anyway, rather than leave the job halfway done, and have to wait until Saturday (when the rain will hopefully be done) to finish. I will need a bit of Goof Off to clean up some of my splatters, that’s for sure!
I went by this morning to cover the open surfaces (windows are out, gauges are out, and the covers for the cockpit lockers and cabin are down) with plastic to keep the bilge pump from working overtime. The light was too dim to see the surface very clearly. But the color already looks so much better than before I started!
Tonight, and for the next few nights while it’s raining, I’ll paint the covers that I removed in the nice dry garage, and, hopefully, perfect my brushing technique. I’ll also have a chance to practice putting on the non-skid before attempting it on the rest of the boat.
[Top]Blisters
Steve R and I met at the boat yard today. I came with resin and hardener. He came with everything else: a drill with a paint remover disk, cups for mixing resin, throw-away paint brushes, and I don’t remember what all else.
He arrived before I did, and had started squirting water on the bottom and drawing circles. He showed me that the water helped us to see the raised spots on the boat bottom more easily. The raised spots were places where water had gotten in and formed blisters. Not too bad blisters are those that occur within the boat’s gelcoat. The ‘bad’ blisters are those that have gotten into the fiberglass.
After he’d gone over the entire bottom, Steve took the drill with the paint remover disk, held it sideways, and ‘sanded off’ the spots. Most were just raised spots that he sanded off. A few actually had liquid in them and they popped like water blisters. Books I’ve read since said that some of those things have quite a bit of pressure under them and that one should be careful when they pop. Luckily, mine just oozed.
We then mixed the resin and hardener and he showed me how to paint the mixture onto the spots. For the deeper ones, we took fiberglass matting and placed it in the hole.
There were a few bumps on the keel. Those we filled with some type of filler – I’ll need to find out what we used, which was mixed with the resin.
Tomorrow, I’ll need to come back, sand these down, and put another coat of resin on them.
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