Paint Work

Flying Cloud's paint

Although this project took over a year to complete, we did not spend a year on just the paint job..
Flying Cloud spent a number of years in Mazatlan with her second owners. During that time she had been painted with some sort of epoxy paint. Then there were many touch-ups and of coarse the quality of the preparation was far from satisfactory.
Preparation is the most important part of any paint job. That also includes re-gel coating a boat.
If I looked down the hull Flying Cloud had one huge dimple after another. This is usually caused by someone with a sander that doesn't know anything about what they are doing. They dig huge holes or flat spots in the surface. Then they simply prime and paint. Once the gloss finish is on, these flat spots become very evident.
So our goal was to first remove all the old paint and get back to the gel coat surface. Of coarse in doing this we too added to the problem of these waving spots in her topsides.
We had no idea of what the existing paint was or how well it had been prepped. So taking the safe route, we took all of it off and started fresh from the original base.
Once this was accomplished (after many weeks with a sander) we were in a position to choose whether we wanted to Gel coat her or paint her.
Gel Coat is by far the best way to go on any boat. It is extremely durable and only had one draw back for us. With the hull in such poor shape we were faced with a lot of 'block sanding' or 'fairing' as it is sometimes called.
If we decided on gel coat this fairing process would be at least three times the work of doing an Awlgrip paint job.
The next issue was that Awlgrip has some short comings with regard to the abuse a cruising yacht may encounter.. While it is a gorgeous finish, it is not recommended below the water line. If immersed in water, it CAN blister and peel off. My concern was with making passages and having the rail down for days on end.

As usual everything is a trade-off. Gel coat was too much work for the project at hand. It would have been the better long term route, but since we know Awlgrip so well, we can always fix it anywhere in the world.
Awlgrip offered some fantastic primers and surfacers that would allow me to really fair the boat the way I wanted.

So I started with the various primer/fillers and hand sanded each coat in an effort to get the hull fair and straight.

It would take one day to spray on the primers and upwards of nine days to hand fair each coat with a 2 1/2 inch by 17 inch board. This process was done seven times before the paint was applied.
So to say it took a year to paint the boat is a bit miss-leading. I would work four or five days at a time. Re-apply more filler. Let that cure and then come back when I had recovered from the previous sanding. I'm getting too old for this crap!
In the end I am very happy with the outcome. But this is NOT something the armature should attempt without qualified guidance every step of the way.

So given all this, I'll present the photos of the project with captions where needed. You can "click" on most of the pics to see a larger view. You can also 'right click' on the large photo and download it if you want.