The title says Painting a boat but maybe it should say, how we painted our boat. I don't know much about painting other than what we did with our 23'walkaround over last winter. Another thread on the subject prompted this one..<br /><br />Our boat is a 1991 23' walkaround cuddy. It has an 8' 6" beam and a full transom, with a bracketed outboard.Over the years it has taken its share of bumps. We've run aground a couple of times and bumped a dock a little harder than we should have more than once. I had one one crude repair on the transom back in 2001 that I painted over but you could see it, there were other noticable but not bad scratches too. Then we hit a pile.<br /><br />
<br /><br />I was already thinking about doing some repairs, now I had to. <br /><br />I began our project by cleaning the boat completely.We washed it several times using every harsh detergent we had. The boat had not been waxed since the previous spring (7 months earlier) but we still scrubed it ending up with an final wipe down with acetone and clean rags. After that I put some paper in the old DeWalt 6" random orbit sander. I would tell you I did this with 240 grit paper but to be absolutly honest with you I'm not sure.<br /><br />The sanding with the electric sander was really just a way to commit to the job to be honest about it. After I had scuffed (and that is the right word) the entire hull with the thing I had no choice but go forward. With the hull sanded I took to making the repair to the hole. I had already ground out all of the damaged glass and peeled back the interior material to expose the glass. I began on the inside and built up the repair. The finish on the outside was done in epoxy and finished with NAPA's microlite auto body filler, Plain glazing putty was used here and for scratches too but so little is left after sanding that the camera can not capture it. The microlite holds up on boats. The applicaton is probably less than a hundredths of an inch thich anyway, almost all of the patch is pure epoxy. Blending in the flair of the hull was a real treat, it is a compound curve and took some serious sanding to get right. I probably had 10 hours in that repair alone.<br /><br />At about the same time all this was going on I decided to install one of the new high performance in-hull transducers Airmar had come out with. So I removed my existing thru-hull and had to glass the hole shut. By boat was not high-end on the day it was made so I had some concern that there might be voids in the layup of the hull under where the transducer would go. I had no efidence for this, but I was concerned. So I broke out my grinder and removed most of the hull material, right down almost to the gelcoat skin, in an area just a bit larger than the transducer's tank (about 6"x12"). So I had that hole to glass up and then I went ahead and rebuilt the bottom up to an almost flat pad on which to mount the transducer. There were also a couple of other scrapes that I filled with a mixture of West System's 404 High Density Filler and epoxy and then sanded fare.<br /><br />So now we are to this point:<br />
<br /><br />With all the repairs done we began the sanding. We sanded with progressively finder and finder wet papers ending up with 360. This was straight forward work and my wife helped with quite a bit of it. She could do one side in a day but she would stop after a few hours. I don't know what's wrong with the old girl. I got to where I could do a between coat sanding of the whole hull with 240 grit paper in about 4 hours. Just to put this in perspective, both my wife and I are in our late 50's. So this isn't something that any reasonable healthy person shouldn't be able to tackle.<br /><br />I had decided to paint with Awl Grip earlier in the year when I was just toying with the though of cosmetic repairs. I spend a good bit of time in the company of some of North Carolina's custom boat builders and one of the who's advice I have great respect for said it was the only thing to use. Considering that the boats the man builds (and paints) cost over a million dollars per hull it was pretty much a no-brainer for me.<br /><br />Awl Grip's web site has a downloadable Application Guide that became my bible in the month or so while we did repairs. I followed every step and direction in their guide to the T. I used their products only, I did not try to substitute anything, nor would I had someone told me of some money saver. I used their system start to finish. If I had used InterLux's paint or 3M's I would have done exactly the same thing with their systems. I suggest you do the same.<br /><br />As good as the Awl Grip guide is it still lacks in one way. It really doesn't talk much about application. I will.<br /><br />We do not have a building I could put the boat in and because our place is very hilly I had no choice but park the boat right beside the road. This is where it would be painted. I do not have a compressor. I have only a bit of experience painting a couple of cars and motorcycles, but even that was years ago. It became clear to me almost immediately that spraying of any of the 2-part paints wasn't something I was going to be doing. To put it bluntly the stuff is too dangerous for my liking and I was not willing to toy with my health - which is currently good. Application by either brush or roller was said to give good results, that would have to be good enough. I would prepare as if the boat were to be sprayed in black and then I would roll it in white.<br /><br />I had some experience with rolling and tipping from the previous winter. I build a tackle box that would later be mounted in the boat. The box was made from plywood, glassed over, and then cut out for inserts that hold those plastic Plano Boxes. The box was then coated in homemade fairing compound and sanded. Then I painted the box using Interlux Bright Sides. This was the only time I had rolled and tipped anything. In fact I had not even heard of the process before doing the box. In short, for those who haven't seen it, it works like this. Paint is applied with the roller to the surface but it is generally applied quite thin. After the paint is evenly distributed make a final pass with the roller and then come back immediately with a dry paint brush.<br /><br />
<br /><br />What you will be doing with the brush is not painting in any sense. You will be just barely dragging the very tip of the brush across the paint with as little pressure as you can possibly apply. No paint will have been put on the brush and in fact if you do this right at the end of the painting session the brush will barely need to be cleaned. You are trying to touch the paint with the brush but get no paint on the brush. You will pull the brush down the paint in one direction only and you will make one deliberate stroke only, never going back over the same spot but moving over just a brush width and doing the next stroke. What you are doing is called knocking down the dipple. The dipple is that little bunch of raised little lumps in the paint where it pulled off the roller face. Most of these will normall lay down as the paint settles out but if you can remove the majority of them immediately then the natural process, which leads to the the finish's ability to reflect a true image, then the natural process is enhanced and the finish shows it.<br /><br /> Roll in an direction you like but only tip moving down if you are doing a hull. The reason for this is straight forward. If you move the brush side to side across some number of vertical passes of the roller what you end up with is hundreds of individual brush strokes as you go around the hull. On the other hand if you brush vertically what you have done in effect is covered the entire hull in one single brush stroke from top to bottom. I can not explain it any better than that so if it makes sense to you that's good and if it doesn't just trust me on it, brush vertically.<br /><br />Now I need to give a credit. As I said, I am not a painter and have little experience painting. It doesn't help anything that I do not care for painting either I suppose. In my search for information on applying Awl Grip I ran across a web site hosted by a fellow named Tim Lackey. Mr. Lackey refinishes sail boats and has a web site that is simply a wealth of information on how he goes about that.<br /><br />You can spend days at his site, which can be seen at http://www.triton381.com/ and what got my attention was his parts on painting. I sent him an E-Mail asking a few questions on the subject and he came back and told me more than I could have ever hoped for. I can not thank him enough for the time he took in walking me through the painting process. He is an awfully nice fellow.<br /><br />We began by rolling on a coat of Awl Grip's 545 primer. This is a flat white primer and using it was really as much practice for us as anything else. We tried tipping the primer right from the start, but it was clearly a waste of time to do that so we quit. Our painting technique was horrible and so our between coat sandings took some time. I knew Awl Grip is applied thin, but I had no idea what thin really meant. I was applying it too thick (causing runs) and I was not using enough reducer, which also caused runs. We sanded. As every coat was sanded and as we were learning how to apply the stuff we spent a lot more time and a lot more money on materials than we should have. The main problem, as I would learn later, was that we were not using enough reducer. Awl Grip recommended something like 25% as the maximum (just from memory, if you use the paint look it up) but rather than be the maximum they should have called that the minumum. At any rate I also decided that sanding with just 240 between coats would be sufficient. The paint would cover to that level of sanding and I had heard the arguments for 'tooth' for the paint to bond. I don't beleive it but I used 240 anyway.<br /><br />Just as a side note, for those who didn't know it the surface area of a sanded surface becomes greater as finer sandpaper is used. Don't be to concerned about concerns about the paint not 'soaking in' in gel coated boats. What the heck, same paint be it Awl Grip or Imron or any other of the 2-parts is used on automobiles and airplanes and to the best of my knowledge paint doesn't soak into steel or aluminum either. However if you were painting a car or plane you'd probably prep down to 400 grit or so. Why not on a boat? In my case going below 240 didn't enhance the look so I didn't do it.<br /><br />We kept applying primer coats and sanding without reguard for if we sanded through to the gel coat or not. The goal was simple, to have one primer coat come out after sanding out any imperfections (as well as generally sanding the entire surface of course) on which there was unbroken primer around the entire hull. Because some areas where repairs were being made got several coats of primer as repairs were made and other spots got double treatment now and then too I could not say how many coats were on the hull. Generally it would be safe to say that the entire hull has 4 coats on it before we had an unbroken coat. After that we applied one more coat of primer and sanded it. By the time I was using the pencil trick.<br /><br />Oh, and I should have mentioned this. After every between coat sanding, and at least a couple of hours before a coat of paint, the entire hull was washed, dried, and then wiped down with acetone to remove any skin oils.<br /><br />Awl grip gets harder the longer it stands. You want to sand it within about 24 hours of applying the paint or you will be there forever. After about 4 days it is almost impossible to sand. Because of temperature concerns (minumum of 55 degrees) I was painting in the afternoons. The following morning I would walk around the boat with a pencil in hand. Any problem area got a circle around it, a large circle, and then the circle was filled with smaller X's and just swirls and such with the pencil. These had to be sanded out of course, once you draw on the boat there is no choice.<br /><br />The priming process was interpupted by winter and so somewhere between primer coats 1 and 4 you can insert January, February, and a lot of March. In the spring I just washed it down and contined as if winter hadn't happened.<br /><br />We began the color coat following directions to the T and I was getting runs. Tim told me to reduce more because thinner paint doesn't run as badly as thick paint. Who would have known? He was dead right. Here is the only trick to applying Awl Grip, it is 2-part but so simple it boggles the mind. Use more reducer than they say and then apply the paint as thinly as you possibly can. If you can do that and keep the bugs out of it you'll be pleased with the results. To give you an idea of how thin the paint was being applied consider this. When I finally got it right we were mixing up just 24 oz of material to coat our 23'x8.5' boat. I mixed up the initial batch using the maximum recommended percentage of reducer and then every time we dipped the roller in we added one cap full to the roller tray. That worked perfectly for us.<br /><br />Now a word on application. My wife is a better painter than I am, and for reasons I will never understand she seems to enjoy it too. When we applied paint she went ahead and actually applied and spread the paint. Her job was to get it on the boat and to make sure that there was complete coverage - but also to apply it as thinnly as possible. She used a standard GlasKoter quarter inch nap covers at first. These are rated to be used with 2-part paints and will not fall apart. They are good but the seemed to hold a lot of lint (that had to be picked out of the paint). In the end I was using a cheap cover, also 1/4" from my locl Ace Hardware. It had a lot less lint and also held up to the paint. I think they cost about half as much too. Anyway my wife use one of the standard 9" rollers and applied the paint. Then I came along about 2 feet (maybe the width of 3 roller passes) behind her. I had a small 7" roller that used a roller cover that had a nap about like felt. I had loaded my roller with paint initially but ran it dry ahead of janet before comming back behind her with it. What I did with that roller was very similar to tipping. I went back over what my wife had applied. If there were any runs forming I fixed them by thinning out the paint in that area. If a bug had landed I removed it and fixed it. I got rid of the lint and I hit any spots that were missed. Also, the smaller very fine roller knocked down the roller dipple my wife was leaving. So we didn't tip the final coats but we did something similar.<br /><br />Awl Grip the color coat doesn't act anything like Awl Grip the primer. The primer is difficult to work with. It will run on you in a heartbeat. I can not say enough good about the color coat paint. Tim had warned me not to expect too much from the first coat, that the stuff really didn't shine until the second or sometimes even the third coat. What he didn't tell me was that the appearane of the paint continued to improve for days after application. We sanded between coats, just as we had done with the primer, and on the 3rd coat we had one final unbroken coat after sanding. That meant that the 4th coat was going to be it. We had a good day for painting and so we put it on.<br /><br />When we were done (it took the two of us about an hour and a half to apply a coat) the paint looked real good. Somehow we had avoided all but one or two bugs (small ones at that) and no blowing weed seeds. In about 4 hours the paint was spectacular. The next morning neighbors were stopping as they drove by. It is hard to explain that a white surface can be reflective enough to shave from.<br /><br />
<br /><br />All that is good about our paint job comes from two things. We took a lot of trouble to prep the boat, both initiall and between coats. The second reason is more important. Awl Grip is just an outstanding product. It was the paint, not the painter, that made this project come out as it did. The paint is extremely hard, probably as hard as the original gel coat. The paint is amazingly reflective but that comes with a price. It can not be repaired by blending in a patch. With Awl Grip you paint a panel, not a patch. You do not wax Awl Grip. There is no reason to and in fact it will likely loose luster if you wax it and will yellow too. The paint is good for at least 10 years in the south, more in the north. The paint is expensive, extremely expensive, but not over priced.<br /><br />I would sugges this for amounts. I bought a gallon of primer paint (and whatever amount of hardner and reducer is needed for a gallon) but I could have got away with half that amount if I had known what I was doing and had used more reducer. In the final color coat paint I used a half gallon to do the 4 coats and still have the other half that I intend to use to do the topsides this comming spring. I'm also going to use it along with InterLux's non-slip additive to do my No-skid decking. The only thing I'm thinking about doing is masking off all but my cabin top an then applying a coat of primer to it over top of the color coat. That would give me a dull surface on the cabin top, which would greatly cut down on glare for the driver but not be much noticable from outside of the boat.<br /><br />So there are my comments on or paint job. They come from a reluctant painter and in fact I make no claim to be a painter to this day. We got a good job because of the material and a willingness to follow directions. I know there are 'tricks' to good paint jobs that I don't know a thing about. I'd sure like to hear some of them before I tackle that top side. What was your painting experience like?<br /><br />Thom
<br /><br />You did a beautiful job on your boat
and on that tackle box! I dont remember seeing pix of it when you first posted your Awl Grip photos.
