Road to Painting

Sanding the world's largest small boat was no fun but it's done, and I'll leave it at that.  With that chore behind me (for now -- I know I have all the top layers still to do) I turned my attention to painting.  This was something I'd been looking forward to for a long time and was excited to get started, which translates to staring at the boat for long hours thinking about how to pull off this next major phase of the build.

 

The first thing I needed to do was to ensure the boat was still level after all that sanding, including hours of sitting on the hull.  Here's a leveler that shows pretty flat but not exactly flat.  Will this cause an issue?  I don't know.  I couldn't see where to fix it so I called it good and made myself aware of a possible correction later.

At least the transom seemed to be straight up and down and left and right.  (I purchased a laser leveler for $40 from a Big Online Company) as well as a tripod for it to sit upon.

Like many builders before, I used the leveler to trace a line in pencil around the boat.  This is where the line from the topsides crosses the chine into the bottom half of the hull.  Part art, part science, I decided to use the "lower line" here for painting.  You can see the faint red line from laser to the left of this photo.

I noticed that somehow the line I was tracing on the starboard hull was a little lower than the line I traced on the port side.  I think it's "heeling over" just a couple degrees so my line wasn't quite even?  Not sure.  It was straight, just maybe a half inch or so lower all across the hull.  That implies that the correction would be half the variance on one side negative and half on the other positive.

I decided to check this by hanging a ruler off the chine and marking the hull where the line would be and sure enough it was consistently lower.

 

So I marked off from the bow every foot or so and wrote down the distances for confirmation, then transferred those measurements to the other side and confirmed again with the laser.  I didn't bother with the "half here half there" math and just applied the full variance.

 

As precise as I wanted to be, the reality was anything within a quarter inch or so would be acceptable and anything better than that would be fantastic.  So writing "7/16" and "9/16" and then accurately transferring that to the hull was aspirational at best.

 

By eye, I laid down some frogtape for the curve at the transom.  I'm going to mirror PocketShip #1's design here by having a "boot strap" run around the waterline.  I used a sheet of paper to trace the curve of the tape, cut this out, and transposed and then transferred the curve to the other side for a match.  

 

 

 

I am glossing over this process a bit.  In reality, it took a couple days, a couple hours each time, and a lot of frog tape to finally satisfy my OCD.  Some builders simply painted to the corner and called it a day.  I don't know why I can't be some builders sometimes.  All I can do now is pray that I don't embarrass myself by having a wavy, uneven waterline. 

 

But before painting, I had to re-open the centerboard slot, a task I'd been avoiding.  Sitting on the hull, using some combination of box cutter, pliers, and the random orbital, this was a bit of a bear and caused quite the mess.  I briefly regretted putting so much 'glass here as I was cutting through it, but eventually appreciated that this is one strong boat.  There is a lot of angst over keel damage and many builders have reinforced this area with epoxy'd rope, graphite, and Kevlar.  I went with traditional 'glass -- just a lot of it.

One thing I wasn't ready for was the amount of stuff that fell into the slot -- bits of 'glass and sanded 'glass and whatever else had accumulated in the garage over the years.  I might have to fashion a vacuum hose to get down there, or alternatively, I can try to blow it out.  I can reach the very bottom of it through the inspection plates on the centerboard trunk but I can't reach the "shelf" as it sits now.  If I let it go like this I'm guaranteed a jam so I'll have to figure out a way to get in there.

I also noticed that while taking this down to a "grey matte finish" I went through a bit too far here and there.  So, again, out came the epoxy!  This is actually serious business to get this right as at least one PocketShip suffered some water damage at the centerboard slot because of sanding through to bare wood.  The swelling of the wood caused the centerboard to jam and that's not an experience I'd like to repeat.

 

After waiting for that to cure and then sanded down again, out came the painting supplies -- finally.

And came up with this --

 

The pictures are way better than the actual painting project.  This was just primer, after all, soon to be covered in "Shark Grey" anti-fouling paint, but it's still pretty great to get to this point.  Over the next couple days I'll have to source a trailer and some more primer, but for now I'll call it a day!