After a week of playing chicken with the rain clouds and despite three broken Chinese paint guns, we finally completed spraying on new gelcoat! She looks amazing even with the 100’s of bugs now adding character to her topsides…
We are getting painfully close to the finish. It’s suppose to rain all weekend so the painting will resume Tuesday on the bottom. In the meantime we will continue the monumental task of sanding all the new gelcoat in preparation for a good buff and wax. When you spray the gelcoat, the finish is textured orange peel instead of glass smooth – so that requires a lot of sanding with 600 then 800 and then 1500 grit wet sandpaper before its smooth enough to buff and wax.
We thought about painting the boat with two-pack paint but decided against it for numerous reasons: one – lack of access to a high-quality marine LP paint; two – complete lack of a controlled spraying environment free from dust, dirt, leaves, ash, bugs, and all manner of other flying debris that would certainly ruin our paint finish; three – the ability to sand out the bugs and the ability to fair gelcoat and then apply more and sand again, which we have done 2-3 times; and lastly, gelcoat is harder-wearing and will scratch instead of chip off. The main concern I have is longevity of the adhesion to the old gelcoat…only time will tell how long it holds up. It seems to be a strong bond now but ask us in a year or two if we made the right decision…
We have also serviced the starboard saildrive, ground the old paint off and started applying the interprotect epoxy primer. We chipped the old rubber boots off and we plan to epoxy glue the new ones on and then use epoxy filler to fair the edges; we hear they are notorious for coming loose…
In other news, we thought we found evidence of a rat that made its way aboard through the saildrive hole. There was a small dropping and some chewed foam on the nav table. That kicked us into high gear! We went straight to the grocery and bought glue traps and some coconut cookies. We set the bait stations and sealed off the hole. Well after a few days all we caught was my bare foot! We came to the conclusion that it must have left the same night. We hope at least!
Plans are well under way to construct the coconut log railway to get Quixotic back in the water. We are planning to put two coconut longs under each keel and extend the railway 50 yards behind the boat into deep water. We then plan to put 2″ steel pipes perpendicular to the logs and place steel plates over these pipes. The keels will rest in a U-channel beam welded to the steel plates. The whole thing should slide carefully back downhill. We will hold her back with a truck or tractor. That’s the plan at least. Stay tuned for the actual account!
Here are some shots of all the paint prep and finally her new gelcoat before the sanding and buffing…
