Pain and Disappointment
12 May 2016 | St. Mary's, GA
Capn Andy/Hot and humid
It's time to write about pain. I made a mistake and stuck my thumb into the whirring trim router. Ouch! I didn't want to see what had happened, I guessed that my thumb would be half chopped off. Before any blood started flowing I jammed my hand into a nitrile glove. I didn't have my first aid kit available. It didn't hurt that bad, but I worked more slowly. It would probably hurt more later.
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I was trimming the corners of the lower part of the beam. It was the lower 2/3's of the beam and only the part that fit inside the port hull. After routing the exposed edges and cleaning them up with sandpaper I gave them a primer coat of unthickened epoxy. I had other areas to paint, which is a good idea so that you don't have leftover paint. Both the epoxy and two part LP paint set up after a while, so you have to use it all up.
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I was relaxing later at the communal kitchen area and got on the bike. I was looking down at how my front wheel was grinding over the boatyard gravel when I ran smack into a new boat that had been blocked up right near the kitchen area. I wasn't going fast at all, but it really rang my bell and I had to get off the bike and sit down. More pain.
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The Brits next door were continuing to work diligently on their paint job. They had started by removing everything from the boat surface. All the cleats, winches, stanchions, pad eyes, and even the molded in hatches were removed. All the surfaces were scraped, sanded, faired with compound, resanded, made as fair as can be. The alloy framed hatches were set up on a special table and the plastic panes removed, caulking removed, gaskets removed, new panes of new plastic were trimmed to shape with a straight router, and the hatches were reassembled, looking better than the new ones in the marine store.
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The tremendous amount of preparation work was necessary for the professionally sprayed paint job with very expensive paint. Then the painter let them know he couldn't do the paint job. He hadn't a window in his schedule unless they would wait a long time. The local boatyard painter who painted a monohull yacht right in front of their boat was obviously not an option. That paint job came out with grain and overspray in the finish. They then decided to do it themselves.
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DIY paint jobs can come out rivaling a professional spray painting. The technique is "roll and tip" using foam rollers and high quality brushes to fair any imperfections that the roller leaves behind.
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The Brits began rolling high build epoxy primer on their boat. It was a nice light tawny color, and it was obvious the surface had been prepared to perfection. Meanwhile I was laboring with my bloody thumb in the glove and trying to put as much epoxy on the exposed surfaces of the crossbeam as possible before I buried it in the hull where I couldn't epoxy it or paint it. My experiments with mohair nap sections of paint rollers didn't work out too well, the surface was lumpy and I wasn't going to sand off any epoxy, I wanted more on the beam, not less. I didn't care too much about cosmetics because the beam was out of sight, only visible to someone swimming under the crossdeck. I resorted to using the tried and true chip paint brushes and slopped on a couple coats of LP arctic white over the epoxy lumps.
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Then I heard sounds of consternation coming from next store. I went over. "See this?," he said, "When you sand down through these four coats of primer, the first 25% goes quickly, then it gets progressively harder to get it down where there is no orange peel. See here?", he pointed to a small area that was looking perfectly smooth, "It will take all day to make this one hull side look like that." He was asking for some sympathy. I took him over to my very rough beam, lumpy, drips of paint, and said, "This will make you feel better." He looked at it but didn't say anything.
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The photo is of the end of the beam, it is upside down.