Saturday, March 24, 2007

Setback with the flooring

Since the last post (in November) we have made progress but very little. Mostly mounting the chairs, leaning post, rod holders, cleats, etc. We noticed in Jan that our Durabak had the ability to peel off of the floor in certain sections....coming up in strips...we also noticed that the transition areas (where the floor meets the sidewalls) appeared to be "drawn" so that the durabak was not actually bonded to the floor or sidewall and would fail if stepped on or given some stress.

So, after some arguing (more reluctance and disgust) we pulled the seats, leaning post and hatches and began the removal of the durabak from the floor. This has been loads of fun, sandblasting (sandblasting pad on the grinders), sanding and scraping the durabak off, re-epoxy painting the floor....

The best we can figure is that the primer we used (which was suggested by Durabak as sufficient in the application) either did not bond correctly to the floor or the D-bak did not bond to the primer...in some areas we had great adhesion, in others, it was very $$ to have it pull away as it has....

The plan now is continue stripping, epoxy paint, prime and paint like we did the top coat (but with 4-5 coats of topper) and then put down strips of d-bak in the high-traffic areas. We think this will look a lot better too, so the entire inside of the boat is not grey.

We have had no problems with the d-bak in the areas that we applied it to finished top coat, only to those areas that we only primed. Damn that was expensive....