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Hull |
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Hull |
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 Electrolysis
Left is a picture of what happens to your favorite folding prop when you
don't put your zincs on your drive shaft properly. I have been sailing
for 23 years now and for some unknown reason never found out about
putting zincs on properly. Buy zincs with the tiny copper balls on the
inside so they can make contact with the shaft better. Also they should
have four bolts instead of two to hold better. The secret is to
"Hammer" them on with a hammer. After you hammer them tighten
the four bolts again. Continue hammering until the bolts won't tighten
any more. (courtesy of Stan on "Onnetar")
We continued to grind and fill any nicks and damaged areas with West epoxy mixed with 410 micro balloons for fairing. This makes it easier to sand down and smooth out. Then next step was to hand sand all areas to be painted (except for the anti skid areas) by hand. This was to give the new paint something to stick to. After that was done the deck was scrubbed down and all dust washed off. Because we didn't want to spend the time and energy stripping off all the hardware, we had to spend considerable time masking off the toe rail and all the fittings.
The smooth surfaces were painted first, allowing us to move around the deck by stepping on the anti skid areas. We applied two coats to make sure everything was covered well.
It is very tempting now to tackle the topsides!
This sort of thing is on going. Our boat has no gelcoat so everything is Awlgrip paint, which is not waterproof. The result is the odd blister that must be repaired.
Julie also repairs and fills scratches with epoxy with different fillers depending on the the wound. Here she is fixing a large scratch we received getting off the customs dock in Opua New Zealand.
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eck
Painting
Mixing the two part paint entailed
combining paint, catalyst, flattening agent, and thinner. The whole mess must
sit for 15 minutes before it is ready to be used. It is important to keep the
mixing of the paint ahead of the painter. If the painter runs out of paint the
job will dry out and leave brush mark in the surface. The painter also gets very
anxious about all this.
A couple of days later we started on the
anti skid. We masked of the area and Julie applied the first coat, while I
followed behind her shaking anti skid granules into the paint with a salt
shaker. The next day we swept off the excess granules that didn't stick in the
paint. We than applied another coat of paint to seal in the granules.
Next we attacked
the aluminum hardware that had never been anodized. This included the bow
fitting, main sheet traveler, salon hatch, and fairleads We had to sand
and grind everything down to bare metal. What a mess. After completing that we
primed everything with two part primer. We then applied the Black two part
Awlgrip we had been carrying around for a few years... done....
The result was OK. Acceptable, not
spray-paint quality
but nevertheless, we
were quite happy that the deck is new looking, easier to clean and protected
from the elements.
Painting
maintenance
