Friday, 28 March. So, Coppercoat sounds like a great product and I am still looking forward to 10 years of anti-fouling without a haul-out, BUT it is certainly not user friendly at least in the tropics. First Problem: pot life. Coppercoat comes in 'kits' that contain 500cc each of resin, hardener, and copper. The usual and recommended procedure is to mix one kit at a time and apply it before mixing the next. Each kit will cover about 170 s.f. for one coat or about one side of one hull. (Actually the exact coverage is 1.75 kits per coat per hull.) It has a pot life of 1 hour at 50*F (which we, of course, have not seen since we left New England.) At 86* that life goes down to 30 minutes and it doesn't even say what it is in the 90's. I emailed the rep. and he recommended mixing half kits and thinning with isopropyl alcohol @ 5%. Sounds like a plan.
As you probably know, isopropyl alcohol is commonly sold in pharmacies as “rubbing alcohol” in the US. In Panama, however, “rubbing alcohol is denatured ethanol. And no, you cannot use ethanol to thin Coppercoat. In the US, paint stores usually sell denatured ethanol (denatured by adding a small amount of methanol so you cannot drink it and therefore no liquor tax) as a solvent. In Panama, they sell “Industrial Alcohol.” Do you think it says anywhere on the label (which is all in Spanish, of course) what “industrial alcohol” is? Of course not. Do you think the clerk knows what it is? Of course not. Do you think the company (there was an email on the label) will tell me? Of course not, never answered email inquiry. So what do I do? I cannot use it if it is ethanol, but it doesn't say “denatured” so I'm guessing it is isopropyl (those are really the only two choices that are readily available.), but how to be sure. One brilliant clerk at Do It Center (the Panamanian affiliate of Home Depot) found the answer: take the cap off and sniff it! Sure enough, it smelled like good old rubbing alcohol, not vodka! Problem solved.
So we have our alcohol, we have our kits, we have containers to mix in and rollers to apply with. We are set to go. The weather is sunny and bright, probably about 90*, but the weather forecast calls for 50% chance of afternoon showers. Oh well, you can't wait forever. We decide to go for it. Deb measures and mixes, I apply. Initially it goes on like a dream – easy to apply and covers well. About half way through the half kit, however, it is already thickening. It goes on harder and is harder to spread out. Eventually we decided to add more alcohol at this point and it worked perfectly – easier to apply again and covers more. We did the first coat in under an hour, but we used too much Coppercoat – 2 kits instead of 1.75. Since we only have 1 extra kit, that could be a problem. I'll have to try harder to get on thinner coats. We ended up getting four coats on using 7.25 instead of 7 kits. Not bad. We still have .75 of our extra left. And it look great!
Which brings us to Problem #2: IT IS WATER SOLUBLE FOR 48 HOURS. Therefore we need to put up the plastic 'skirt' to protect it from rain. Now why anybody would make a product to be applied to boats that remains water soluble for 48 hours after application is beyond me, but they did. I couldn't get the drop cloth with tape attached the you buy in the US in little rolls, so I ended up getting 8 rolls of 10' x 25' 3 mil plastic and lots of blue tape. Working together, we managed to get it up and taped to the hull, but it wasn't easy. About then it started to rain. And it wasn't a sprinkle like we have had a couple times since arriving here, it was a real Panamanian rain – it poured! And the skirt leaked. We scrambled to repair the leaks but tape doesn't stick to wet things. What a zoo. Fortunately the rain only lasted a few minutes and we were able to dry things off and get the leaks repaired before it rained again. Which it did. But the damage was done. My beautiful paint job has big streaks of washed off Coppercoat. There are three consolations: I can repaint the streaked areas when I do the jack stand pad areas; the hulls have to be sanded prior to launch so that will (hopefully) minimize the cosmetic effect; and finally, the only one who will really see it are the fishes! Why use a water based epoxy instead of a solvent base that evaporates quickly and is not affected by rain? WHY?
Thursday we did the port hull. Trying to use less Coppercoat, I applied it with foam rollers instead of the mohair ones. I had brought several West System rollers with me. They worked well and did apply thinner coats, but were a lot slower as they held much less paint per trip to the tray. We were half way through coat three when the rain came. At first just a very brief shower that didn't really do much damage, but it was clear that more were on the way. What to do? All four coats need to be applied in one process so we cannot stop and finish tomorrow. Well, we decided to finish what was in the tray and then put up the plastic before mixing more and I would have to apply the fourth coat working under the plastic skirt. Thank heavens Deb had the brilliant idea to cut the plastic short so it did not hit the ground. On the first side, we had let it drape on the ground and even weighted the bottom to try keeping it in place. Not a good idea. The resultant 'sail' pulled the tape off the hull. Cutting it short solved that and also meant I could crawl under it. Except now the wind blew the plastic against the wet paint (and me). Who on earth ever decided to make a water soluble product for this application? (or did I already ask that?) Anyway, it was a good call as it rained repeatedly during the time it took to apply the final coat. Now it hasn't really rained in the two weeks we have been on the hard, but the two days we are painting? It rains. Go figure. At least epoxy doesn't stick to plastic so the skirt blowing against the hull causes only cosmetic issues, not structural. And again, we are going to sand it and only the fishes are going to see it. My head is another story. By the time we finished, all my hair (no jokes about that!) was caked in Coppercoat from the plastic whipping back and forth as I worked. And, of course, it was drying fast. We went to the showers and Deb had to wash my entire head with alcohol to get it off. It was a long and somewhat discouraging day. The weather couldn't have been worse. If it had rained all day, we would have postpone applying the Coppercoat. As it was we just had to struggle with the rain when it came. Which it did twice more during the night. I was awakened @ 0300 by the rain alarm (rain on my face from the open hatch). I got up, grabbed a flashlight and tape, and went and repaired where the skirts had come off. Fortunately not very big areas that repaired easily. The same again @ 0600. That time I just stayed up, made coffee, and am on my third cup as I type this. Today all we have to do is fight with the skirts each time it rains or the wind really blows (which it usually does just before it rains). Oh, I have more projects: reassembling the props, reinstalling the table in the cockpit (now that they painted with two part polyurethane that has a good pot life, but dries almost instantly once applied. Why couldn't Coppercoat be like that?!)