Finally Painting the Bottom

I finally, caved and said --- it is good enough!  Time to paint. I think Peter and James were ready way before I was.  Even though we plan to dry sail the boat, we opted to paint the bottom with the Interlux Interprotect 2002e White barrier paint.  This paint is actually sandable, and would allow us to get the bottom of the boat extremely smooth, and at the same time provide a barrier coat for when we do leave it in the water for a week here and there.  Here is what she looks like after a couple of coats of paint.

This is went it really started to get exciting.  All of that brown QuickFair splotchy brown on the bottom is completely covered.  We ended up rolling on 2 full gallons, in roughly four coats.  I wanted it to go on thick, so I could sand it down.  We thinned it out with 10% Interlux 2333N Reducing agent to minimize the orange peel.  It felt great to get it on the boat.  Feels like we are getting soooooo close!  The ultimate plan is to sand this smooth, and then put a final coat of PErformance Epoxy on the bottom to cover the Interprotect 2002e.  Just a quick note, as you can see from the picture, the "white" Interlux Interprotect is really slightly gray.

Tired of Fairing

Believe it  or not, it took a lot of fairing to get the hull straight and smooth.  I kept thinking that every time I put more QuickFair on, it would be the last time.  I would let it harden, and the head up to the lake to sand it smooth, just to discover a few more places that needed to be filled.  I also had one mix of QuickFair not get mixed quite right, and  as a result it never set up properly (never hardened).  This was a real bummer, as it meant I had to first sand off all of  this "bad" epoxy, and then mix up a new batch and apply it.

In the end, the boat looked pretty lousy, with the splotchy tan bottom, but it really felt pretty good and  smooth.  It just looked bad.  So I couldn't wait to get some paint on it.  In the lower picture, you can see all the blisters that were hand ground out (with a dremel tool), and then refilled (with QuickFair), and then sanded smooth.  This is sanded with about 80 grit sandpaper.  It was very important to use longboard sanding techniques to ensure that the hull remained straight and  not rippled.  So most of the sanding was done by hand with a long board.  It was getting close though!  Almost ready for painting!

Filling the Thru-Hull

This boat still had the sink drain that exited just above the waterline on the starboard side. While I was originally not going to fool with it, James convinced me that it would not be an overly involved project to fill it.  Since we were in the process of fairing out the hull anyway, I said why not.  Here is what it looked like before hand.

The sink holding tank (fresh water for the sink) had already been removed.  This is important, as it blocks access to this part of the hull under the sink. James took an angle grinder, and cut off the thru-hull stub that the drain pipe was connected to, and ground down the inside of the hull.  It is important to grind both sides here to ensure that the plug made of epoxy filler won't pop either in or out.  After grinding, we taped the outside the hull in preparation for filling from the inside.  Since this part of the hull is close to vertical, we taped half a dixie cup the the top open in the up direction, to contain the epoxy resin mix and hold it in place.  In this case we used West system fiber filler with SystemThree epoxy to mix up a pretty gooey  consistency.  It was not quite peanut butter consistency, but much thicker than syrup.  You want it to run into all the voids, but not run too much so it all runs out.

After that set up, James ground out the excess (the half shape of the dixie cup) on the inside, and we pealed back the tape on the outside.  The epoxy had shrunk in slightly on the outside, which was just perfect for adding some QuickFair fairing compound and getting it perfectly smooth. Here is what it looks like after.  Once this is painted, you'll never know if was there.  Took a couple of hours to do, but in retrospect, it was well worth it.  Thanks James!

Fairing the Keel

Once the boat was back on the trailer, it was time to start fairing the hull to get it as smooth as possible.  It started with James helping us fair the keel, which was really in pretty bad shape.  We used an angle grinder with a wire brush to take off all the epoxy and paint that was loose.  Then we ground down all edges.  After that, James used the QuickFair to build it back up and shaped the keel to optimal/class legal shape using the proper keel templates.  Needless to say, it really turned out well - and I am sure it will be extremely fast.  He also made sure that the keel was optimally located (I think as far aft as possible).  You can get a sense for how bad it  was from the pictures below, and how much better it looks now.

The photo above is from before ....

Below is the photo of the keep after ....   Much improved!  He also worked on the rudder and got it faired as well.

Back on the Trailer!

Well, we finally got to a point that we felt we could get that boat back on the trailer.  The keel had not yet been done, and would need a significant amount work.  Looking at the calendar, and knowing that it would take us way too long, we decided to go with a pro.  James has done this several times, and has access to templates to get it just right.  But in order for him to work on the keel, we had to get the boat on the trailer. So once again, out come the concrete blocks and the 10 ton jack!

 So, this was the goal: get the boat up high enough, by raising the beams one block at at time, that that we can get the trailer underneath.  Also, we need to be sure that we space the blocks (towers) far enough apart so we can back the trailer underneath.  Took a bit of thinking and planning, because the boat would roll up, but once we started the stacks, it would be hard to move them.  Oh, and did I mention that the boat needed to sit right in the middle of the beams, so it would sit on the trailer properly?  Lots of details to watch.

 So far it was looking pretty good.  Notice how the aft port block stack is slightly lower and leaning outward somewhat?  This was something we really had to watch, because when raising the opposite side, the blocks preferred to lean and stay flat with the beam, rather than staying flat with the earth and having the beam pivot on the edge of the blocks.  It was easy to fix, simply relieve the pressure on that stack by jacking up the beam on that side and letting the block stack level out before dropping the beam back down.  Was just a bit of a pain, because it meant a few extra steps.

Finally, we got the boat up in the air.  Felt a whole lot higher when we did it, and was a bit un-nerving to have it just swinging there.  In the end, I think we got lucky, because the boat ended up pretty much in the middle  of the beams, and the stacks were far enough apart to let the trailer underneath, and we had enough blocks to get it up just high enough.

After that it was time to put the pads on the trailer (we had left them off to help with clearing the beams), rais the pads up to hold the hull, and then remove the beams.  Once the beams were down, the block stacks came down, and ta-da .... the boat was off the ground, and back on the trailer.  All-in-all, since this was the 3rd iteration, I would guess that it took us just about 2.5 hours to do this.  Not too bad!

Seems like we already did this!!?

Time to do the starboard side.  Fortunately, by this time Peter has become an expert at prepping the QuickFare,  filling the holes, and then skimming it all with a wide putty knife to remove the excess filler.  It works very well, and significantly reduces the amount of sanding that must be done.  Of course we have to do it several times to get all of the holes filled, as the epoxy filler shrinks a bit as it hardens.

In this picture we hadn't yet started doing grinding, sanding or filling this starboard side.  You can see from the photo that we had to remove a layer of Interlux 2000 that the previous owner had put on the boat at some point.  As you can see it was a lot of work.  Did I mention that great long boards that Peter made? We also continued using that extremely heavy grit sand paper (36 grit) to quickly knock down the high spots. Just more of the same...

Flippin' the Boat

In any other small boat sailing context, this would not be any issue.  However, in this case ... well ... it was a bit more complicated.  We reversed the process we used to get the boat onto the ground, and block-by-block raised the boat back up into the air, and then got it to roll the other direction when we started letting it back down.  You have to be sure to have extra slip space on each side of you, as you literally are flipping it over with the keel as the pivot point.  Here are a few pictures of the adventure.

In this last picture, you can see the QuickFair on the Port side, and the unsanded, only slightly ground out Starboard side.  Time to start grinding and sanding all over again.