Bottom Paint

Sandblasted, wiped, taped, primed and painted. The picture was taken with my phone...we are in the process of re-installing everything and still have to put another coat of BP on it and get it jacked off the bunks and painted underneath.

Rub Rail, Cables, and Floor-take two

The wife and new addition split for Spartanburg this weekend and allowed some substantial time to be spent on the project. Friday night was spent taping off and cutting out the patterns that we wanted on the recently addressed floor. Since the last update, Phil spent alot of time, sandblasting the original Durabak off, epoxy painting the floor, priming it, and then applying generous coats of top coat paint (3 total). We have concluded that we caused the durabak to fail b/c we did not spend enough time in the prep work...so this time sand, vac, tac cloth, acetone wipe, solvent cleaner wipe and then apply the paint - each time...it appears to have resulted in better adhesion. After the sanding, we applied the new Durabak on Saturday morning.

While that was setting up, we installed the rub rail...per the install instructions, it was pretty easy to do but there are alot of screws in the install.

After the rub rail was finished, I sported the tyvex suit, respirator and goggles and started sandblasting the bottom in preparation for the bottom paint - mostly to get the barnacles and old paint off. Phil got back to putting the engines back in order and came up with a method to get the hose covers inside the engine covers...looks better than before and should give us a nice seal:

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....