Monday, April 28, 2008

First round of paint on!

After all the months of sanding, cleaning and other preppery, the first bit of real paint is on! Of course, now theres another huge round of prep work underway, but at least it's something.

Last week we did more prep, cleaning and taping, and Saturday sprayed white awlgrip on the non-nonskid areas of the deck. Came out looking really nice. Very glossy; the boat still looks like its dripping wet.

If you've ever heard a price for boat painting, and thought it sounded kind of high I strongly recommend you do it yourself, with a pro helping you. It will take you about 3 days to realize that whatever priced they named was a bargain. It's truly an insane amount of work. Between taking off old finish, sanding, cleaning, masking, priming, scotchbriting and a billion other painstaking steps, you'll end up spending several hours per square foot of boat.

Today Mick and I spent 5 hours masking off the nonskid areas of the boat. Thats 10 man-hours of tape. Tomorrow I sand the nonskid to prep for paint, which we'll roll on wednesday.

While I'm still enjoying this project, I'm definitely ready for the paint portion to be over. On more than one occasion I've thought how nice it would have been to fix the bow and slap a couple coats of brightsides on and go sailing!

Prepping, sanding, masking painting: 15 hrs.
Thats our deck, with the new paint mostly covered up with masking. I'm glad we took our time with this and got nice radiussed corners, and nice detailing around things like blocks, traveler, rails.

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