DaySailer.org Forum

In your guys experience, what is the average cost to fully repaint hull? Rustoleum marine paint is $11/quart at my local lowes.

If this is a dumb question, sorry.

Also, instead of gelcoat, you can paint instead right? Thanks!

A dumb answer would be that you get what you pay for.

I just repainted my hull. The majority of the time and effort in painting is in the prep. Therefore, I'm interested in achieving a very durable and long-lived coating.

I applied SystemThree water reducible linear PU. I have a bias towards water-based paint systems, and within that restriction, the SystemThree paint performs really well above the waterline (which is fine for a dry sailed boat like mine).

The price is a bit more than $11 / quart, and I believe we used a gallon. Paint price alone was not even half of the total price of the project.

The paint that the previous owner had applied had failed in sections, leaving a surface as rough as very coarse sandpaper in places. Of course, this first started where it was least visible, that is under the bottom of the aft part of the boat. I shudder to think what that must have done to my boat speed...

GreenLake,

I tried System Three LPU on the piece of cuddy bulkhead that I cut out to install an inspection port, starting with Silvertip Yacht Primer, then LPU white, then LPU clearcoat over the white. All of this was from the inexpensive trial sizes available at the System Three website.

It looks great, more like showroom-floor gelcoat than like paint. The surface is rock hard.

The only downside was dealing with bubbles, and with sanding and buffing the color coats. If I do the whole boat in this stuff, I'm going to have arms like Popeye before it's done.

How did you apply it? Did you thin it?

Alan,

Thinning is essential. I had help from a painter friend, and his standard answer to all problems was more thinner (water). At times, he'd even mist the paint from a spray bottle ("mist" is what you want, not drops).

I did order the "tipping brushes" that SystemThree has on their website. They worked better than any other ones I had. We used two brushes, so I could switch to a dry one half-way through one coat of the hull. Three would have been even better, as they don't work as well when they load up. Washed and *dried* them between coats.

Rolled with short nap/foam roller with second person tipping the bubbles (brush held 90 degrees, featherlight stroke). We never let the paint sit even 12 secs before tipping, so it would still level after tipping. Anyway, we had no bubbles at all, except for some of the early coats where we occasionally missed a spot in tipping (practice helps!).

We did add one or two extra coats, so we could lightly sand the top layer at 1200-1500 grit and then buff it (3M rubbing compound followed by 3M Finesse It). That worked really well for us, and while we did have some upper body exercise, none of us turned Popeye

I did not use the clearcoat, just didn't occur to me, but I can see how that would look even more spectacular. The trial size containers were about right for the waterline, I think we used two.

Thanks, GreenLake.

I ordered three System Three tipping brushes and a bit more paint. I've finally decided to paint the transom, which has thousands of tiny pits in the gelcoat.

Silvertip Yacht Primer cratered pretty badly, despite a thorough washdown with Epifanes wax remover. I tried Epifanes two-part epoxy primer, which works pretty well. A test patch of System Three LPU white on top of the Epifanes primer looks good, so I'm going to do the whole transom that way and see how it turns out.

Alan,

I've never used their primer, since they say that their paint works over epoxy. So I always used neat epoxy instead, esp. to seal in any putty or other imperfections. (It takes a bit of work to not get brush marks with epoxy, on the hull I ended up using squeegees instead of brushing it on).

Great to hear that epifanes appears to work for you. Keep us up to date on how it holds up.

BTW, in case you have Silicone contamination, the usual solvent washes do little. Soapy water seems best, apparently you don't dissolve as much as disperse the stuff. (May not be your problem, because I think the Epifanes primer would have been susceptible as well, but I just thought I'd mention it).