And so to work
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Wed 28 Nov 2012 10:12
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We have a list of jobs three pages long, some
expensive, some horribly dirty and some just irritating.
But top of the list, and why we come out of the
water, is repainting the hull. But on this occasion there was more to
it. Water had got under the sealing layer applied to the fibreglass hull to
waterproof it. Fibreglass absorbs water slowly by osmosis and although we did
not have that terrible problem it would have developed over time. So all
the bottom paint has to come off, the hull has to be sanded down, and the hull
dry out for a couple of months at least before a new waterproofing layer is
applied and then antifouling again. Luckily this fits our NZ agenda quite neatly.
But getting the old paint off is a nightmare job.
It has to be scraped off by hand, and all the residue collected to avoid
pollution. The hull is 65 square metres. Each stroke of a scaper removes, if
you're lucky, about 500sq millimetres, or 0.0005sq.metres. In round terms,
that's about 130 000 scraper strokes to remove the paint, many of them applied
from ladders or scaffolding, or standing bending over backwards working overhead
and all of them requiring significant physical effort. In short, blooming hard
work. And all of it done in overalls with gloves, breathing mask, protective
goggles and ear defenders. And you still get covered in nasty blue
dust.
Here I am, hard at it:
 The white paint is antifoul, with several layers of
older blue antifoul beneath it. It gets scraped off to reveal the grey epoxy
paint underneath. This in turn will later be sanded off to reveal the
gelcoat surface of the hull. Note the sheets on the ground to catch the
scrapings.
Alison had a few ineffectual swats at the hull with
a scraper and promptly declared it beyond her, and I reckoned it would take
me three horrible weeks just to scrape the hull if on my own - so we asked the
boatyard to help. So we've had two very nice young guys Aaron & Jason doing
the majority of it; I've escaped with about a quarter of it, and no sanding. The
scraping is done, and the sanding will be by the end of the week.
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