Ugly Prep Day and Some Testing Gone Bad.

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This year Tower Marine has me in yard storage and I'm less than 100 feet from the power! I decided I to have to take this opportunity to go to work on the deck with the power sanders and get some prep done. 



Things always look worse before they get better right. I started by grinding on the hatch with my dremel tool. It had a lot of gel coat cracks and I found the dremel to be the perfect tool to open up the gel coat, so I could fill them with West System 410 fairing compound. After the first round I sanded and laid down a layer of high build laquer primer. Then I sanded and filled again. Then another layer of laquer primer. It is not perfect but it will be much better than what I started with. 


The cockpit area remains one of the trickest to work in.  All the corners and working around the drains has taken some time. I removed all the hatches and sanded in all the little crevise that allow water to drain from the seating. It took quite a while to get all the traveler position number stickers off as well. Things are coming along and hopefully it won't be to much more filling and sanding.

The deck I sanded down with a 3M pads on a palm sander. This actually went really well and took less time than you would think. 


So test spots are important. Someone suggested I try a Ceramic paint for the smooth sections of the boat. This comes in a spray can and I thought well there is not really a lot of smooth surface on the boat. Most of it is non-skid.  I decided to give it a try. I had a tough time from the get go the can was spraying chips out and I ended up with a few runs in my test area. The product just would not mix properly no matter how much I shook the can. This proved to be a poor choice for this application as a result I'll be sanding it back off. At this point I think I'm going to use Pettit Ez-Poxy for these areas. A few sailors I know have used Rustoleum Marine and it seams to be a 50/50 shot whether it works. Also I'm not sure the product looks all that well a year later. Hopefully the EZ-Poxy will work and look good for the long term. 

 

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