Day 337 Final fairing Painting hull starboard
Above, the photo shows a high up view of the aft.  It's such a pleasure to "not see" any more primer red and duct tape tracks. She's truly becoming a yacht. We must keep the dirt off by taking of our shoes and placing them on a towel before we go aboard. We love the clean lines of the blues.

  Now, back to the extremely horrid looking starboard side!

As we weren't entirely happy with the imperfections of the port side showing through, we decided to make more of an effort ( and take more time ) on fairing the hull.

We kept the thickness of fill to a minimum, and swallowed any lumps in our throats caused by lumps in the hull that would require too much filler. The top photo left shows a couple of the larger patches that were needed. Typically they were at plate joins, and one on either side of the large chainplate.

This deformation may have been lessened by welding on a 6" wide strip of plate inside, the welding the chainplate to it instead of the hull. On the other hand, sandwiching plate on a boat is bad practice because of rusting hazards.

Gena got her tennis elbow back smoothing with the grinder, drill, and sandpaper. After a while I got the hang of it as well but tried to save my arm ( still sore from day 336! ) for the inevitable painting job to follow.

Masking this time should have been easier but since day 336, the recent blind spot in my left eye from a retinal occlusion has gone back to warped vision. Not a good thing when trying to mask a straight line!
Of course I began from the bow thus needing to use my left eye to do the aligning. Silly!

Gena told me she wasn't sure whether it was straight or not so I left it. Good enough I guess!

 

Filler was applied to every little nick and scratch as some of the plate was far from perfect. One area looked like a worm track that wiggled around for a few inches. Very strange.

   

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After all the fairing we ran out of daylight so took half a day off work to finish the task of painting.

This time I knew better how to feather off the roller at painting joins. It takes 2 passes minimum top to bottom to get everything the same texture. The short hair roller is great for blending but leaves fine little lines on the "dryer" side of the paint.

2 full coats were applied from bow to stern, but I sent Gena off first with the brush to paint the larger filled areas. We noticed before that paint will soak in a bit thus causing a duller less reflective area. Don't ask me why because I don't know...

 

 
Now we're rolling! After a few more boats I will be a pro!
This trick seems to have worked well, only then I had to deal with the texture changing when going over wet paint. This of course corrected itself on the second pass.

A thing of beauty! ( Spots are on lens not boat )		 Later in the evening we removed the mask ( sorry it was too dark for pics ) and the bleeding was minimal. Only the port side detailing will need fixing.

We must wait until midnight before deciding whether or not to pull the tarp over. The risk of rain is ever present this time of year.
 
Important addition/update!

 Once the boat was hauled out to the coast, she was no longer protected from the sun by trees, and was out in the open. This proved fatal for the Marine-99. After only 2 months it began "dusting off". I can wipe my hand a few inches along the hull and my hand turns blue with smurf talcum powder! They suggested a "thane" topcoat which was brought to my attention later on, but I couldn't justify coating over such a nice job with yet another opaque color, not to mention all of the masking etc.
   To make matters worse, the paint below the waterline actually bleached and lost it's color! This is almost irrelevant as we are putting anti-fouling paint on anyway, but even the waterline is not red now, it's pink. I really feel like we wasted our time with this stuff. It's an embarrassment and we have had to haul out because of it. Strangely enough, the Ceram-Kote 54 (white) hasn't shown any signs of powdering. That is what we wanted to use for the sides as well until the salesman talked Gena out of it.
  We hope that no-one else has done the same as we have here, and I felt it was my duty as webmaster and fellow boatbuilder to tell the world what happened. We spent thousands on this paint, and basically have a very expensive primer.
Guess it's back to Interlux!
*S*2008

 

Day 337:
14 hours +spare time - Finished smoothing Starboard side, faired masked and painted (yay!!)


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