Basic Painting Questions

[marcusg]

I'm totally new to painting anything not to mention a boat. I have a rough-condition daysailer paintjob and I want to fix it, but I don't need it to be perfect, I don't need to be using the exact perfect paints for every part. In fact, I only really need to paint the deck/cockpit, since under the waterline is great and the topside is in pretty darn good condition.

My basic goals:
-Keep sailing as much as I can before fall
-Not have the boat get messed up before its time

What I don't need:
-A boat in "perfect, like-new condition"
-To use all the industry-standard methods on all the different needs/problems

At first I was going to totally strip the deck and cockpit, but then I figured why do the extra work if I could just sand it smooth and then prime/paint over the old stuff. But I realized even that is quite the job, as there are many attachments and sanding takes quite a while. Plus there's things that seem like they straight-up need fixing before I paint over them, like the bench backs which have some kind of old wood caulking that's coming out of them, and some cracks that go deeper than the paint (is that called "gel coat?" or is it simply fiberglass fractures? - pics included of all this below.)

So my basic thought is this: all I really need to do is sand/scrap the peeling spots this season, so long as the boat won't rot before I get to paint it this winter. Is there any danger in just sailing it as is, or can I just do a quick job with something like clearcoat after a quick scrape/sand to sort of freeze it in the condition it's now in? I know that if I start taking things apart to do a really good job I'll get hung up and won't be sailing until next spring (I'm not an efficient handyman.)

Pictures on google drive: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nz-cN ... AK49_1P8p-

[tomodda]

Ahn.... the joy of painting

First, there's plenty of really smart folks on this board who will be very happy to help you. I'll throw in my $0.02, but read what others have to say and do some forum searches.

Second, fixing a badly-done paint job takes a lot longer than just doing it right.

BUT - painting is a winter project! There's nothing wrong with your boat from what I see in your pics. It can wait. Sand/strip the peeling paint off, just so you're not stepping in it while sailing, and then GO OUT AND SAIL! It's a plastic boat, nothing will get hurt by sailing with it as is, cracked gelcoat and all. (*See P.S. BELOW*)

Here's what I'd do... go over the boat with a paint scraper or spatula and get the worst of the peeling paint off. Then strip it with my favorite paint stripper - CitriStrip:

https://www.hardwareworld.com/p9w77kc/C ... n9EALw_wcB

Great stuff, let it sit for an hour or at most overnight then scrape off the gunk. Here's how I sailed my DS1 last season, stripped down to her "undies":

Stripped!

FallsSail.jpg (44.02 KiB) Viewed 1164995 times

Sailed perfectly fine, even if she looked like a freshly-peeled egg .

When winter rolls around, get your boat under cover somewhere (preferably heated) and do a good job on her. I *LOVE* Kirby Paints:

https://kirbypaint.com/collections/kirbys-marine-paints


But you can paint her with anything from Rustoleum (they make a marine paint!) to your-wallet-is-the-limit.

Good Luck and Fair Winds!

Tom


PS - OK, things that CAN get hurt - dry rot in any of the wood parts, a split in your rudder or centerboard that lets water get into the core, and take a look at the re-enforcement right behind the lip of your cuddy. If it's like most DS1's, theres a length of iron rebar glassed in to hold up the lip. Make sure that there's no cracks, etc that would allow water to infiltrate and rust out the rebar. I mention the rebar because that center post makes me suspicious... could be there to just make the hull stiffer (good thing!), or it could be there to "fix" the rebar. Double-check.

PPS - Wow! Who put a double floor on your boat? And that hatch forward of the centerboard? This isn't one of the "new" DS1's from Precision or CCD is it? And that lock-wheel on the centerboard lever! Cute, what happens when you hit a rock while the CB is locked?!? I'd rip-and-replace those wood coamings if I were you. Can wait till winter, but you show they are already rotting. Anyway, as long as she's not leaking and the mast is staying up, go sailing! Worry about it in winter.

[Signalcharlie]

Sail this season.

Pressure wash it to get rid of the peeling stuff. If there are bare areas of fiberglass, where the gelcoat is gone, or bare wood, apply a coat or two of RustOleum or Total Boat Wet Edge to those areas as a bandaid for the season.

Trim away any rot to get back to fresh wood and coat it with varnish or paint.

If you see any voids into fiberglass or wood, fill them with thickened epoxy TotalBoat THIXO or Pettit Flexpoxy to prevent water intrusion. If there are wood joints with failed sealant you should ream that sealant out and apply new sealant.

When the time comes for a total repaint you can sand off the big chunks with 120 grit, down as low as 60 if you go with light presssure. Then fair the big divots, repair fiberglass damage and wood rot, prime and paint.

We recently repainted our DS II CYANE, if you scroll down to the bottom of her blog you'll see some of the steps that we did. http://smallboatrestoration.blogspot.com/p/o.html

Lots of other paint project on out blog and wood repair. We'll be happy to provide tips or recommend materials that we have had success with.

[tomodda]

Cyane's Skipper is quite right! You can probably get away with a quick pressure wash, BUT.. I just looked at your photos a lot closer and see that you have some fiberglass problems:

1) https://drive.google.com/open?id=1LKz_E ... TEqpvrYJzB

Is that your transom? By the motor well? Gelcoat is cracked down to the matting.

2) https://drive.google.com/open?id=1K2QU6 ... ififFDiRAM

Hoooboy.. this is the cuddy lip cracking that I was writing about. If water gets to the rebar behind, then it will rust AND swell, damaging the cuddy roof. This may already be happening.

Issue #1 you can fix for now by dabbing on some temporary Rustoleum. But Issue #2 needs some thickened epoxy stat, per signalcharlie's recommendation. I don't know if and how you need to do further work here. At the very least, I'd poke into that crack with a screwdriver and do some thinking about what you find - hopefully no rust and nothing soft or yielding.

Your DS1 appears to be "non-standard", maybe it doesn't have rebar back in there? O'day built some weird "one-offs" in the early years, who knows? Most importantly, I'd wait till board moderator GreenLake chimes in, he seems to be an expert at these things. Aim to get your boat safely out on the water and worry about cosmetics later.

[marcusg]

Thanks for the replies so far, guys. First off, I'll have to put this in all of my posts, but, my boat is not a DS1, so that's why it looks different. It's a Sailstar Explorer, a 17' knock-off of the DS1 that only got made 600 times or so. Sailstars have a different flooring than the DS, apparently. When I sanded mine down I eventually got to a sort of greyish material that I assume is the fiberglass? So the floor is not gelcoated then I suppose? I could take a picture of this sometime.

Tomodda - I'll check the cuddy lip to see what the sailstar has in there and I'll definitely throw some epoxy in there as per charlie's recommendation. And what did you mean by coamings that should get replaced? Like the seat-backs I showed with the sealant chipping out?

RE: pressure wash, do you guys rent that kind of equipment or what? And does it make a mess with paint everywhere, or where do you do it? I live on an organic farm and I don't think my landlord would like having paint chips everywhere.

RE: using rustoleum or Wet Edge as a "patch job" to where bare fiberglass is exposed, what is the dry time on those? I read somewhere Rustoleum takes like a month to harden.

If I opted to strip with citristrip, what do I need for tools? Some sort of scraper/sponge? Is the paint that comes off pure liquid or chunks I can put in trash bags?

-Marcus

[Signalcharlie]

Is it on a trailer? Take it to a car wash. It does make a mess, we bought a small electric pressure washer. You could put a painter's drop underneath.

Alternatives would be to get a paint scraper and clean big chunks that way.

Rustoleum cures hard in a few days. Some paints like a good coat of wax, you wait a month before buffing that.

[GreenLake]

Some comments, not in a particular sequence.

• Car wash is a great way to get the rough stuff cleaned out. I knew someone who took his DS to a car wash at the start of each season. I owned a $49.00 pressure washer for a few years and used that.
  
• The fact that your boat is only a DS clone shouldn't matter much for this kind of question, although some details will be different. A useful discussion for anyone with a boat in a similar state.
  
• The cracks and so on do need to be repaired, but they are also not something that's easy to cover temporarily.
  
• You do seem to have the expanding rebar (no reason why we shouldn't assume that the clone used the same "technology" here as the original. That part you can leave alone until after hte season is over, and then it will be a project cutting out the rebar and replacing it by something suitable (e.g. a laminated beam). You will find this discussed here on the forum; a while back, but you could do worse than sitting down and reading through the old posts.
  
• Where you have cracks that go into the laminate, or perhaps even into some wood backing for the transom, slapping some house paint on it might help keep water out to the end of the current sailing season (or until you are ready to do a proper repair).
  
• Wood that is open (and can air dry from all sides between days on the water) I wouldn't worry too much about. You want to get to it, but waiting till winter should be fine. What you'd like to avoid is trapping a lot of new water somewhere, where it can't dry (not even in a heated garage in the winter). If the boat was kept dry for a while before being sailed, then sealing those areas, where possible, might mean they will be drier than if you don't cover them now. But if you got them saturated already from your test sails, then you might simply be locking in water.
  
• Unless you treat a spot that's still dry, you'll need to remove any temporary paint before you can first dry out the boat and then do a proper job.
  
• Totally get you on the "not perfect", however, you'll need to budget for making the job "effective". Or you'll have to redo it.
  
• Exposed laminate, if dry: you can get clear gel-coat repair paste from Evercoat which you can apply with a spreader. It's going to create a barrier that is thicker than paint, and will stand up to abuse (even underfoot). You can then apply paint on top for more even optics. Cures fast, can be sanded. The clear stuff tends to the be the one that cures in air (some gelcoat gets inhibited in air, that stuff you can't use). If you're not sure whether you need to open it up because water may be trapped in the laminate, use a bit of spray paint for temporary cover. Easy to remove by sanding. (Mostly, I don't expect a dry-sailed boat to have issues with wet laminate, except where rainwater can puddle, usually, things dry out well between trips).
  
• Your cockpit sole may have been painted rather than gel-coated. For single hull boats, the inside almost always is painted, because it's the side towards the mold that gelcoat is applied to. However, for a double hulled boat, you'd expect naturally that the inner hull is formed in a mold so that its exposed surface has gelcoat. But either they didn't do it that way, or someone painted it later, in which case, you really are stuck with painting it again. (Although, I've used the clear gelcoat over areas where paint had worn through to the laminate, and have not had it flake off from the places were paint still adheres well).
  
• The easiest paint I've used is Pettit's EasyPoxy (which is a single component paint, oil based). It's really easy to apply (if you don't care about brush marks, you can brush it on) and though it's soft-ish for about a weak it's really tough and durable once cured. My "stress-test" for it is my silverware drawer which used to have dings in the melamine coating. I applied a coat of EasyPoxy many years ago and it's not showing signs of wear. Also holding up well on my transom. The paint's not brittle, so doesn't crack from thermal or other expansion/flexing. I've had that problem with a PU paint I won't use again.

[tomodda]

Marcus:

Re: stripping with CitriStrip, you wind up with a gunk of "CitriJelly" (consistency of hand-cream) and paint. Basically, it breaks the bonds between the paint and the layer underneath. My boat also had 3 layers of pain, so it was several applications of CitriStrip to get it off, but easy work. Whatever you can't get off with a paper towel, you can scrape off with a paint scraper. Minimum set time for it to strip paint is an hour, it strips a bit better if you leave it overnight, and - perversely - it kind of bakes back on if you leave it much longer than overnight. So, you can get your boat stripped in one day or 3, depending how much of your day you feel like devoting to stripping. I did it in a week, laying down some glop each afternoon and then scrapping the next day, interior first then decks. Not hard at all, just time consuming.

By the way, you can get CitriStrip at any of the big box hardware stores.

By coamings, I mean your wooden seat-backs. You need them to strengthen the edge of the side decks, and you'll want to sit on the side decks when hiking. So... if they appear structurally sound (and give when you sit out on the decks?) then you're OK for this season. But your photos show some rot, so replace them this winter.

Tom

[GreenLake]

The picture showing the transom? looks like there's exposed plywood in that big gash. You may ultimately need to determine whether there's water collected in it (and therefore rot or dry rot). Unfortunately the chance of that is "good". Minor dry rot can sometimes be treated with the SystemThree "RotFix" kit, but sometimes cutting out one layer of fiberglass, getting the wood out, and replacing it is the only workable solution. You can sometimes glue the fiberglass skin back on, instead of doing a full laminate. Your mileage may vary.

[marcusg]

Pressure washing the flakey paint didn't do much, so I got impatient and tried out CitriStrip on the left side of my deck/cockpit. Don't think I put it on thick or long enough, so I only got a partial strip. Here's the deck:

deck (Small).JPG (124.89 KiB) Viewed 1164899 times

And then I found some nice little presents on my floor, which I believe we assumed wasn't gelcoated but just paint over fiberglass and wood (remember, this is a Sailstar, not a Daysailer.)

whats this (Small).JPG (154.5 KiB) Viewed 1164899 times

There are a couple spots like this where the wood is clearly showing on the floor of the cockpit. This is the only one that has nails(?) in it, some kind of repair I assume?

So now I'm wondering if I've really bitten off more than (I want to) chew right now. I would still prefer to continue with the stripping for the deck/cockpit and then repaint those for this season, and then come back to these problem parts in the winter to do more in-depth repairs. Is it okay to just let all this dry and then repaint it for now?

[GreenLake]

You could either do nothing, on the theory that a few months may not make those problem spots much worse, or if you are worried that you''ve opened up ways for water to seep deeper into the structure, you could slap some house paint over it in an attempt to give a bit of a seal. Something easy to remove when you are getting ready to dig out these problem spots.

I believe you have a double hull, or at least a separate cockpit floor, and the wood could be a support (your closeups don't allow identification of where in the boat you found this). Looks like you may need to open up that floor and have a good look and close it up again after repairs. (Requires laminating a flat sheet on your workbench and then gluing that in over the opening (which hopefully goes back to solid laminate on the sides). No way to do wet-layup in place unless you have support underneath.).

[marcusg]

Sounds good. I might just paint it all with boat paint and use a different color for the spots that need to be worked this winter.

Here's where that open wood spot was in floor:

further (Small).JPG (109.9 KiB) Viewed 1164885 times

There's one with the two nails at the top of that stretch of exposed fiberglass and another to the right of it by the centerboard.

[GreenLake]

I think you are overthinking it with the different colors Just use a marker . . .

Looks like this may be a "bulkhead" underneath your cockpit sole. Possibly intended to give lateral support to the CB as well as vertical support to the sole.

The DS had "thwarts" that connected seats to CB trunk for the same purpose.

[marcusg]

So in a spot like the one above with exposed fiberglass laminate (nevermind the exposed wood for now), how would I deal with finishing that? I mean, there's no way I can get all the paint off without sanding it, and if I sand it I'd wear down the laminate. Do I just get it as good as cleaned as I can and then throw on paint when it's "ready?"

[GreenLake]

Exposed laminate is something you might want to "seal" a bit before painting. You can brush on a layer of epoxy or gelcoat, before you paint. Standard laminating epoxy would be fine, e.g. SystemThree SilverTip or equivalent for West System or MAS. Or you can get Evercoat gelcoat, the transparent one called "neutral" - that one cures even if exposed to air (most gelcoats do not). That one isn't liquid so you can use a spreader.

If you have gouges, divots, cracks etc that you would like to fill a bit, you can use an epoxy or vinylester filler (never Bondo, not waterproof). Epoxy filler like SystemThree QuickFair or vinylester like 3M Premium Marine Filler (or if you need added strengthen the glass-fiber reinforced 3M High Strength Marine Filler).

The epoxies tend to be better adhesives, but they also cure more slowly.

Any of that only if you want to keep the paint you put down. If you plan on fully stripping it again later, none of that matters and you should do the correct thing then.