Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Bottom is painted!



It's as easy as 1,2,3 (4,5,6..)! 

We painted the bottom of our boat!  She looks ab-fab, if I do say so myself.  Scott and I started the day, bright and early at 9am.   We were eager to inhale an undisclosed amount of VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) and make the bottom of our little beauty look pretty again.

If Saturday was a "3" on the toxic scale, we made up for it on Sunday! (Yes, we wore respirator masks this time).  But boy oh boy does she look good! 

We started with 3 coats of Interlux InterProtect 2000e epoxy barrier coat (the gray stuff) - followed by 2 coats of  West Marine PCA Gold (rebranded Pettit Ultima SR 40) in blue, then topped it off with a thick coat of PCA Gold in red.  We learned that applying these coats on top of each other while the paint is still "tacky" really strengthens the bond.  Made sense to us, so that is what we did.  We've also read that by applying two different colors (red and blue), you can see where you are "at" when the paint starts sloughing off. (Lesson time! "Ablative" paint eventually comes off in the water, the idea is that when it comes off, so does all the corrosive sea life that attaches to it- like barnacles, for example).  The layers act like a gauge of sorts.  Again, seemed to make sense to us - but the real reason we have two colors is because West Marine only had one gallon of each.  So that made our decision easy.  I like the red better anyway. 

We still have to paint the areas under the cradle pads, and we'll bang out all of those when she's in the sling ready to be launched, after which we'll do one more coat of red over the whole bottom to even it out.   If you have done your math correctly, that is SEVEN (count 'em - SEVEN) coats of barrier coat/bottom paint (SIX of which we did in ONE day).  There is even a calculation to figure out the number of brain cells lost during painting with super toxic copper paint!  It is equal to the square root of the number of coats multiplied by the number of coats...Square that number and move the decimal two places to the right*.  Voila!  It was worth it though,  Eric (the owner of the marina) came by and gave us another "NOA" (nod of approval) and said, "Now this is how a bottom job should look - you guys did a real nice job".

I feel bad for the poor saps who have to scrape it all off one day.

Love,

Brittany & Scott

*I completely made this up, but it sounds about right to me.

5 comments:

Philippe said...

nice bottom! She looks great with the shiny topsides and red bottom!

Mid-Life Cruising! said...

Your sailboat looks fantastic! The bottom looks great and the hull waxed out really nice. Congrats on all the hard work.

Lisa Hanneman said...

Love the red!

Maisis said...

Mind if I ask what may be a stupid question? How do you paint under the braces holding up your boat in position?

By the way. Great blog. I love it! You guys are doing an amazing job on that boat. Looks great!

Windtraveler said...

Maisis! Thanks for commenting! And it is NOT a stupid question, but a good one! We wondered the same thing...Scott painted it the day before she went into the water when the boat was hanging in a sling...the parts where the sling were covered were already painted, leavign the unpainted portions exposed...VOILA! Glad to have you here!

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