More little jobs

Lots of little jobs going on...

 

Painting various compartment covers:

 

Dug my daggerboard out of storage.   Previous fairing efforts were just barely ok, but I'm not willing to spend a bunch more time on it.   First I applied two coats of high-build primer and sanded that down.  Here I decided to hang it up so I can apply the sealing primer to both sides in one step:

 

 

Not fun painting a hanging item by brush - the piece swings around too much.   Doubt I'll do it that way again.

 

Dry-fitting the anchor locker cover:

 

 

I didn't take a picture of it with the hinges fully attached and the door working, but it turned out great.  Which surprised me - I hate jobs like that.  :-)

 

Cockpit non-skid is finished: 

 

 

For future reference, I won't do pre-masking on future non-skid areas again.   Too easy even with careful masking to get edges that are not painted (tiny slivers of primer showing).   Better to non-skid over a real coat of paint, that way things are definitely protected.

 

After sanding the first two sealing primer coats on the dagger board, it still didn't look that good:

 

 

...so it got two more coats, plus more sanding obviously.

 

Poptop being dry-fitted so I can get ready to paint it: 

 

 

You can see the over-sized, epoxy-filled, screw holes for the anchor locker  hatch in the above picture as well.

 

Drilling over-sized holes in the poptop for the slides:

 

 

The tape on the drill bit was supposed to help me not go through the other side when drilling...it didn't work very well:  I ended up with a bunch of holes on the other side to patch.   Worse, when I was filling the holes with thickened epoxy, I didn't realize that I'd drilled through and was trying to fill "bottomless" holes until I figured things out, duh (and my table saw got some epoxy drips).   

 

This is after applying third coat of paint to first side of the daggerboard: 

 

 

This was done by brush, much easier and faster than spraying.   You can see some of the brush strokes still in the paint, hopefully they level out.   And yeah I know, most daggerboards are white but this is a pretty blue and I have plenty of navy blue paint left, and paint is mega-expensive, so... :-)   

 

 

 

More interior painting, part 2

Interior is just about entirely painted out now:

 

 

Settee seats and backs turned out really nice though IMO.

 

I painted a non-skid area on the cabin floor using the sprinkle technique with Alexseal's non-skid additives (with a 50\50 mix of fine and coarse).  This is after the first coat, with the sprinkled non-skid added:

 

 

Hopefully I didn't over-do the sprinkles, hard to know for sure this is the first time I've ever done it.  Easy enough to fix if I screwed it up though.

 

I chose a navy-blue color for painting specific interior areas as a contrast to the main grey color.  It is a pretty blue:

 

 

I started painting the cockpit seats, also with non-skid:

 

 

I am working on the anchor locker door.  Before I commit to priming and painting the door, I want to positively locate the hinge screw holes and do a dry-fit on the boat:

 

 

All of this interior painting takes a long time - sanding, priming (two coats), painting (at least two coats), etc.   Pretty soon here I will be done, then moving on to fitting the boat to the trailer.

More interior painting

With the outside paint pretty much done, I'm now working on finishing up the interior paint.  

 

The narrow bow area is ready for paint:

 

 

A bit of a tight spot for a guy like me:

 

 

I am not painting the interior of the side compartments, but everything else will be done:

 

 

And I've primed down to the bottom of the settee uprights:

 

 

 

I have also primed the aft-cabin deck area.   That was fun - hanging my upper body through the aft-cabin hatch, or scrunching down into the bottom main-cabin area to reach under the cockpit deck. 

 

I'm not touching the exterior non-skid areas for the moment - want to completely finish the interior before I move on.   

Upper boat half painted

On Sunday morning I finished up some final remaining masking details, did a careful wipe down of all surfaces, and got going on the paint.   There were some frustrating moments along the way, including this guy who decided to kill himself immediately after my first coat:

 

 

Another fubar was not mixing enough paint for the first coat, so I had to stop in the middle and mix another batch.   After that, when I refilled my paint cup I didn't get the paint cup cover screwed on tight enough, causing the gun to leak around the seal when I started spraying again.  I didn't realize at first what was going on, so had no choice but to leave the tent and disassemble the gun looking for the problem.   Thankfully no leaking paint was spilled on the boat itself, but I can tell you that I was definitely using some choice words during this stage. 

 

It might be interesting to describe how I managed painting the upper parts without dragging any hoses in the paint.    Hopefully this make sense:

• Stand next to boat.  Take and hold deep breath, disconnect respirator air supply and gun air supply lines.  
• Feed air lines up and over the horizontal tent support bar (you can see it in the picture above.  
• Reconnect air lines.   (Respirator line first - then take a breath.)   
• The air lines are now feeding over the tent support bar.  
• Climb up the ladder, then step carefully over onto the port side cockpit seat non-skid mask area (which I had used extra tape on to reinforce since I knew I'd be stepping on it)
• Hold the gun in one hand, and hold the hoses high with the other hand.  Step carefully on to the cockpit deck surface.
• Step carefully through the main hatch opening onto the settee seats.
• Spray upper deck around the coaming.
• Spray inner surfaces of coaming.
• Turn around ever so carefully, making sure to not bump into the inner coaming surfaces.  (Despite this alleged caution I did bump into the inner coaming at least once or twice. :))
• Spray inside of match hatch flange.
• Step carefully back onto cockpit deck non-skid mask area.
• Spray inside cockpit areas.
• Step back up onto port cockpit seat non-skid area, then back onto ladder and down.

All of these steps are done with gun in one hand, and the other hand carefully holding the hoses as high as possible.  All in all it wasn't the easiest thing but it got the job done.

 

One thing I did not anticipate was the fact that as overspray got on the bottom of my shoes, this caused them to stick to the non-skid masking and lift it off in some spots.   Was surprised by that but didn't cause any fatal damage, just a little overspray here and there.

 

So how did it turn out?   Really good in most areas, but I got some heinous runs in other spots.   (disappointing but oh well).

 

The following pics were taken the next day after I had removed almost all of the masking.

 

 

Cockpit turned out nice:

 

 

 

Aft:

 

 

There are some runs in this pic if you zoom in:

 

 

Warts aside, this is good progress.  :)

Upper boat half masked off

My summer vacation is coming up and the weather is improving enough to do some painting, so getting back to some boat work.   Over 4th of July holiday I prepped, masked, and painted the outside upper half of my boat. 

 

Here are a few pictures after I had everything sanded down to 320 grit, wiped down, and masked off.

 

 

The anchor well will be painted later with the same light grey I used on the interior - I just didn't bother masking it off.

 

Good looking mask job here (imo :)):

 

 

Because I had painted most of the interior last winter, masking off the interior took a huge amount of time:

I spent most of an entire day on masking - ugh.

I chose to mask off the areas in the cockpit (seats, deck) where I was planning to apply non-skid later on.  I tried to be as precise as possible:

The non-skid areas will be done in the interior light grey color, but I think I am going to add a flattening agent to those areas.   Will need to do an experimental test to see how it looks.

Masking around the interior lip of the main hatch flange was a real bear.  Looks like I didn't take a picture of it, but here you can see I basically wall-papered much of the interior (sides and overhead):

 

I had no choice but to have a join line to meet up with the bottom half paint:



 

There are specialized techniques for blending paint lines, eg, soft line tape, fog blend areas, reducer-rich mixes, etc.    In the end I just did not have enough confidence in my ability to succeed with those approaches and instead went with a simple tape line.   I am looking into getting a buffer machine later on to soften\blend the transition.

 

For fun, here is a picture of my latest stash of empty paint-related containers:

 



 

(The two plastic containers on the left are not empty - those are coarse and fine anti-skid particles for when I do the anti-skid areas.)

 

Overall, a good start on boat progress again.