New paint for the Memory Maker, part 2

6-16-2015
 I know, it took me a while to get time to write part 2. I knew it would be a long project painting our sailboat but how long I may have underestimated just a bit. As of today she is on the water floating in her slip, after about 250 hours of my time. But I am getting ahead of myself. Where did I leave off?
 I believe I was just getting ready to start stripping the bottom of the latex paint covering the copper hull paint. Since we are going to leave her slipped all summer we decided we needed actual marine paint on the bottom to avoid that nasty lake Monroe scum ring disease that boats get there. But in order to put the new Hyrdocoat blue bottom paint on all the old paint had to come off. Now for the fun work, not...

 After coating the paint with a striper I was able to scrape it off, a 1 1/2" at a time with a razor scraper. That only took 4 evenings to do. Nothing like getting all this copper paint stuck to your clothes and skin. Amazing how well the copper transferred to my skin. Even more surprising was how hard it was too scrub off.

Even once it was scraped off it still left the hull colored. That made it easy to tell where I sanded and where I needed to.
 Once all the bottom that I could reach with her on the trailer was all scraped free of paint and sanded it was time to get her off the trailer so I could strip the rest of the paint and pull the keel for sandblasting and new paint.
 Luckily Cindy's sister, who lives across the road, offered us the use of her concrete pad in front of her garage which was large enough and level. It is protected from the wind by large trees so it made a great place to remove her from the trailer.

 

 Here she is up on blocks and supported. I had read several stories of concrete blocks breaking and boats falling on their owners so I too extra precaution and inserted 4x4 wood pieces inside the blocks to carry the load and then mad a set of boat stand pads to help support it while we worked on it.
 Once I had the boat off the trailer it was time to modify my motorcycle jack and convert it into a keel jack.

 A few pieces of scrap steel and 15 mins of welding and I had my very own keel jack! The jack worked sweet but there was one small problem I did not see coming. The keel was taller than I thought it would be so the boat was sitting about 2" too low to get the keel clear of the keel trunk. I had to jack it up a few inches at the bow to get enough clearance to remove the keel.

 

 

 Here is the old rusty keel once I finally got to clear the boat and roll out from under her. It weighs 400 lbs and it is a bit nose heavy. Luckily I guessed the positioning of the jack in the right position so it balanced perfectly.

 The keel is held into the boat with four 3" long countersunk machine screws that come up through the hull of the boat. The two on the port side came right out but the two on the starboard side I had to drive out with a pin punch and hammer. Once I got them out I could see why.

 

 

 The keel must have had a heck of a side load placed on it at some point in the last 35 years to bend these two stainless 5/16" machine screws!

 With the keel out I could finally see up into the keel trunk and find the source of the mystery leak that I fought all last season. It did not take me long to pin point the issue.

 

Someone in the past had set the trailer up wrong and instead of the boat being supported by the bunk boards the boat was sitting on the board under the keel with the bunk boards just there to stabilize the boat. Through the years the boat had vibrated on top of the keel long enough to wear through the gel coat and into the fabric. Once that happened the water just migrated it's way where ever it could. That is why I never could get the leak to stop.

 Repairing the damage with the keel out was straightforward epoxy and glass work.







 

While the repairs dried I sanded the whole bottom of the boat and prepped it for the bottom paint. I could only paint the very bottom as I wanted the white hull paint to wrap around and under the blue bottom paint as it would be much easier to paint the bottom paint over the white enamel than the opposite way around. It was not long and we had color going on the bottom of our boat!

During this time I loaded our rusty keel up and took it north about 20 mins to a friend of mine and we blasted the keel to remove all the old rust and barnacles.

 

 We used a very coarse grit blasting sand that the people who painted the water towers in Rocky's county had given him. It made quick work of the rusty old keel and a few hours later I was home spraying epoxy primer on the keel. 24 hours later and we had a blue keel!

 

 Over all I was very impressed with how the boat was built. Instead of a steel keel pin in a steel bracket  wearing out ad breaking off our boat has it's steel pin encased in a thick ploy tube to prevent metal to metal contact.

 

 there was a small amount of wear on the poly tube but not enough to warrant replacement. So I greased it up after I painted the keel and re installed it back into the boat with 4 new machine screws and a new keel winch line, although not in the order I had hoped for. Due to storms being forecasted I wanted to get the boat back on the trailer asap and with the new keel line not being scheduled to be delivered till the middle of the next week I elected get the boat back on the trailer and change the line later. So what would have taken 5 mins wound up taking 2 hours but at least I can change ours on the trailer. a lot of boats you can't and had someone not cut an access window in the port side of our keel trunk we would not have been able to either.

 But before I could put her back on her trailer the trailer itself needed some attention. The carpet on the bunk boards was shot and I wanted to modify the arrangement of the boards to better allow us to load the boat. So I spent most of one whole day replacing, modifying, and carpeting the bunk boards and fighting with all the old rusted nuts and bolts! But it turned out really nice and I think the extended v between the center boards will really help with lining the keel up with the keel slot when we load her.

 

 

 Once the trailer rehab was done I was able to load the boat back on to the trailer by myself  in about 15 mins. After seeing what I needed to change when I took it off I was able to reload it much easier. Here you can see the keel in the slot

 

The bottom that is not painted will get painted after I shoot the white and wrap it down under the water line. Here is our girl all loaded up and ready to head home to complete her transformation.

 

 Although there was still a lot of work left to be done at this point I felt like I might actually make our proposed launch date of June 10th which was just a month away at this point. Little did I know just how much work was left to do...