Painting a Boat
By Robin Roberts
Friday, August 01, 2008
We’ve owned our DF49 RPH for about five years, and we have made a number of improvements and upgrades during that time. The final “big” project was to have the entire boat painted, along with a few other things.
Our boat is a little unusual in that it has a black hull, originally painted with AwlGrip when the boat was brand-new. Although the paint was quite old we could still bring it to a pretty good shine with AwlCare (AwlGrip’s version of wax), but it was clear that the paint was on its last legs – not bad for 18-19 years! The rest of the boat’s original gelcoat was pretty chalky, and we had a number of stress cracks that needed attention – normal for a boat this age.
We spoke to the AwlGrip folks at the Annapolis Boat Show and asked them to recommend a painter anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard who could handle a project like ours, and they immediately suggested Bruce Mallard in New Bern, NC. Bruce used to be the head of Quality and Finishing for Hatteras (now he has his own small company), and Hatteras paints all their boats – so he seemed to be well-qualified for the job. Bruce has also done a lot of testing for AwlGrip over the years so he knows a lot about the products. We met with him and interviewed each other, talking about ADVENTURES’ trouble-spots and most serious stress cracks. We showed him photos of the bad areas and he laughed, saying that if those are the worst cracks, the boat is in great shape for 19 years old. Plans were made and we brought the boat to a yard Bruce recommended in Morehead City, NC where the work would be done outside. Outside? Our painter said that it was easier to control dust and grit outside (where he can choose his painting days) than in a shed; he felt that no matter how good the ventilation is, there is always a problem with suspended particles in the air in a shed.
Once we were hauled and blocked with extra supports for the long project, Jim and I spent two weeks working 12+ hours per day to strip all the exterior hardware off the boat. Other DeFever friends had their boat painted a few months earlier and they warned us to label everything we removed, especially noting the position and orientation of each item. We bought a gross of heavy-duty zip-loc bags, and we used a ton of them to keep things organized. Those suggestions were life-savers when it came time to put the boat back together again.
We moved in with our very good friends Bill and Clara Blanding for the months needed for the painting project. In fact, it should be called the “fix the boat” project, since the primary focus was on finding all the various stress cracks and trouble areas and fixing them structurally. Bruce warned us that he wouldn’t paint the boat until it was fixed, and fixed right. We wanted the same thing, and were very appreciative of the crew’s attention to detail. Cracks were opened up and repaired with multiple layers of fiberglass and epoxy, then faired with AwlFair (an epoxy-based fairing compound). The crew found water in all of the side gates, transom door, and Portuguese bridge door – which surprised us. They were very thorough, but we never felt they were “making work”. Although we were living six and a half hours away, we spent most weekends working on boat projects, and we always stayed long enough to spend some time with the crew on a Friday or a Monday to keep in touch with their progress and the issues they were finding. Over time we developed a great rapport with Bruce and his crew, and they taught us a few tricks. We stayed out of their way, working in other areas of the boat or cleaning the miles of stainless railings and various other stainless bits and pieces. It was hard to see our boat in such a horrid state – she was sanded and covered with pink fairing compound all over the place. 
While we were making a mess of the boat, we decided to replace the davit crane with an hydraulic model from Steelhead Marine (800 lb. capacity). We mocked-up a compression post with a piece of PVC pipe to determine a location that would allow us to swing our big 13’ Caribe and still walk past the post on the starboard side of the boat. The four and a half inch hole in the boat deck for the new davit was a little aft of the old davit hole, and Bruce recommended that we beef up the boat deck around the new davit. We cut the top skin of the boat deck off, dug out the synthetic deck coring in that area, and epoxied a solid block of mahogany in place of the coring. We put the top skin back on, and the crew erased the seam as they prepared the boat deck for painting.
Painting the boat is the last thing that’s done after all the cracks and imperfections are fixed. The crew painted all the white areas on the house and flying bridge first, then the hull, then the decks (with non-skid) last.
It was very gratifying to see the boat go from the “Dalmatian” look of white primer and old black paint to a shiny black hull again. We couldn’t see the painted house since it was finished but covered in masking paper, like a Christmas gift waiting to be unwrapped.
We also took advantage of the painting mess to address the one thing we never liked about the boat – the size of the swim platform. The platform was small and the transom angles outward from bottom to the top, making the useful part of the platform about the depth of a human foot. A few years ago we asked Arthur DeFever about the platform and he felt it could be as much as four feet deep. We decided to make a modest change, adding 14” of depth to the current platform. After looking into several options, we ended up having Bruce and Mossy Guthrie (a very talented marine carpenter) modify the old platform and strengthen it. Of course, a bigger platform will be subjected to greater stresses – downward forces from human weight on the outer edge as well as waves pushing up from below in lively seas. We worked with a local machine shop (Bircher Inc.) to design support brackets that would be very strong and would distribute forces across a wider footprint on the transom. We also stiffened the transom with a large piece of marine plywood, kerfed and epoxied on the inside. The new swim platform brackets had a wider and longer footprint against the transom, and were reinforced with 1” solid rods – two per bracket (the inner rod was to help stiffen the platform). Jim Bircher was a delight to work with – he was interested in the metallurgy as well as the aesthetics of the design, and he helped us optimize material and labor costs to keep the overall price as low as possible.
The decks were the last to be painted, after the house and hull. We chose a tan color (“Moondust”) for the decks to reduce some of the glare from the relatively bright white (“Stark White”) that we chose for the house, and we’re very happy with the finished look. In order to prepare the decks properly for painting Bruce’s crew had to grind off the entire non-skid pattern. The new deck paint had a mixture of coarse and fine non-skid particles to create a very nice non-skid surface (which is easy to repair if needed). The particular ratio of particles was developed by Bruce for Hatteras, and it’s grippy but gentle enough to feel very nice with bare feet. Once the decks were painted and had time to cure, we moved back aboard to continue our own projects and to put the boat back together.
About two weeks after the hull was painted, we walked outside to greet the crew one morning and found a number of small vertical cracks in the new black paint on both sides of the hull. I don’t know whether Bruce or I had more tears in our eyes. Bruce set to work like a man on a mission, taking a die grinder to open up the areas and uncover the layers to find the root cause of the problem. If the boat had originally been a light color, we would have suspected problems caused by the additional heat from the dark paint – but our boat was always black.
Bruce’s experience as a long-time boat builder and his large network of other experts helped uncover the mystery. The problem material was grainy gray filler on top of the structural fiberglass, and was most likely used to repair areas where the hull mold was getting scruffy as it neared the end of its useful life. Our boat is hull #60, and was one of the last few made with the old mold. After a number of phone calls, Bruce was able to confirm that it was German-made polyester filler commonly used in boat yards to repair mold damage in the 1980’s. Unfortunately, the filler expected to “breathe” under the paint, and the newer formulation of AwlGrip (changed in the early-mid 1990’s) is “tighter” and less breathable. Once he understood what he was looking for, Bruce was able to spot the other problem areas by eye and grind the cosmetic filler off, down to the fiberglass surface. The crew added some fiberglass cloth to stabilize the area, then faired and re-primed with AwlGrip’s epoxy materials. We ended up painting large sections of the hull over again, but the problems were resolved.
While Jim and I began to install the huge number of railings, rub rails, and other hardware, the crew re-bedded all the windows around the boat. We were horrified to discover that the original caulk under the window frames was pretty sparse – we’ve never had problems with window leaks thank goodness, but the crew couldn’t understand why! As we re-installed hardware on the boat we replaced all screws with new ones. There were almost 800 in the windows alone. Everything was caulked with BoatLife Caulk (no silicone!), and bedded with 3M 101. The advantage of BoatLife Caulk is that it can be painted. The crew (and we) caulked every seam and then they came along with an artist’s brush and painted the caulk with AwlGrip – gorgeous! The job of re-assembling the boat was enormous – it took much longer to re-install things than it did to remove them. We worked literally from dawn to dusk, seven days a week, with help from the crew. Remember, we were living on the hard in a bare-bones boat yard all this time, so we were very motivated to get the project finished and get back in the water!
Hopefully we won’t have to do this again for another 20 years! It was a big job, but the end result was well worth the cost and effort. We learned a tremendous amount from Bruce and the crew’s expertise, and we were so pleased and impressed by their old-fashioned work ethic and craftsmanship. Preparation is 90% of the effort for a great paint job, and the preparation would be virtually the same for paint or gelcoat, so why not use the superior product? Short-cuts in preparation will result in paint failures, but the fault will not be with the paint. AwlGrip is an excellent product, and is repairable with a reasonable amount of effort. I re-painted all the caprails on the boat a few years ago so I could learn about AwlGrip. It’s a very fussy paint but it can be applied by mere mortals with some thorough study of the Application Guide, careful preparation, a proper respirator, and some practice. AwlGrip is very toxic, so the proper organic respirator is absolutely critical!
