Boat Jobs

In response to one of our comments here’s some more detail about the topsides painting project . . .

Sue and I painted all the white areas with Petit EasyPoxy. We brushed it on. You have to make sure you smooth it out as you go with a good brush. Vertical surfaces are a little tricky as the paint will run down if you put on too much and leave waves in the finish. We have some of that and may go back and re-do some of those. It’s all Sue’s fault!

The non-skid was originally molded into the fiberglass so painting it was a process of painting one way and then at right angles to that to try to fill all the nooks and cranies. (Does a nook differ from a cranie by the way?) A cheap chip bristle brush is good for this. I used a decent brush to cut in around the white having painted the white first up into the cream colored non-skid. I had a bad experience with tape pulling off the white paint before. Free-handing looks pretty good from 6 feet away and goes a LOT faster than taping would have. Most of the boundaries aren’t straight anyway so taping would not really have been worth it I don’t think.

When you're painting you might as well repair all those little spider web type cracks. Those make a solid boat look really tired. I've come up with this method for patching those. First I open up the crack using a Dremel with a cone shaped bit on the end. You need to do this so that you can work in some filler. Then I clean it with a wipe with Acetone. I mix up a batch of West System epoxy with the 407 filler so that it is like ketchup. Now I use a small brush and brush the goo across the opened cracks. If I have a larger void on a vertical surface I lay on the goo and then slap a piece of wax paper on it so the stuff doesn't run out. After about 2 hours you can sand nice and smooth. Looks great when you paint it then. Pic shows some filled in and sanded cracks in the bow. Looks bad but it's actually very smooth and will paint up fine.

Pics of the paint job are tough as in a photograph the old white and new white look about the same even though they look VERY different in person.

Major progress in the windlass department. I decided to use the forward triangle of the anchor locker as a pattern to make a platform out of ¾” plywood. I coated that with two coats of epoxy and then two coats of the white paint we’ve been using. Now the tricky part is putting the angle iron across the anchor locker so that they match up with the holes for mounting the windlass. I came close and then had to slightly move some of the L-shaped slots I had cut to make the holes hit dead center in the 1-¼” angle iron I’m using. Oh that got coated too. You don’t want to see what sea water will do to exposed untreated steel!


We want the chain to go through the floor of the anchor locker and into the chain locker below decks as it always has. Now we need a new hole in the bottom of the anchor locker directly below the hole in the plywood. Hmmm...got to be careful what you mean by below! The chain will hand vertically but vertical is NOT perpendicular to the deck which slopes a little aft at the bow. So, I hung a washer on a string from the center of the hole and marked where this hit the bottom of the locker. That should work.

Mismo likes to help!

Of course all this work is even more fun on a rolling boat!

Now then, that hole is going to be a problem because water is allowed into this locker and then drains through a hole that is hosed to a fitting on the hull so no water gets below in the chain locker. Now I have a 2” hole in the bottom. So, I plan to put in a piece of hard exhaust type hose as a stand pipe. This will also have the added effect of making sure that the chain does indeed go all the way into the chain locker and not start piling up in the bottom of the anchor locker.

I priced chain today. ⅜” high test was 21 EC per foot. 2.6 EC/1 US Dollar. That's about $1600 for 200 feet!!!! Yeah, chain is expensive. We have about 200 feet now but we may cut back to 100 feet and 200 feet of line. We’ll see. BTW, my birthday is in July! :-)

Finally, It's March and our March birthday boys are two of my nephews. Happy Birthday Kirk and Scotty!