Exterior painting
November 2005

Finally, the exterior fairing is done, or at least done enough, I think that I could have gone on forever finding and filling smaller and smaller scratches and imperfections but at some point it just has to be good enough if I ever want to sail RotKat.

Dan Mc Lean, an old friend of mine who has spend his whole life working in boat yards was roped into doing the painting for me since I did  not want to take any chances with the finish by letting a beginner like me doing the work, and we agreed to paint the boat over three weekends. We could only work half days because the Dungeness crab season had just opened and my painting buddy found it more important to get fresh crab then to paint my boat. unbelievable!

The first day we sprayed the hull sides and the underneath of the bridge deck

.

 The next week I spend several days taping off the non-skid areas on the deck and using plastic to protect the finished parts from overspray in preparation of the final "shiny" paint surfaces on the top sides.

This doesn't look like a big deal but it took forever getting it masked off the way I wanted it. We could then use the taped off surfaces as path to walk on while spraying. I did not take any pictures of the finished topsides since I got to be too busy with the next phase of taping and that took a whole other weekend. I  had to mask off all the finished paint so that we would not get any non-skid on it and that included working out the final layout for the deck hardware since I did not want to mount that onto the non-skid. For non-skid we used The same paint as the rest of the boat with a flattening agent  added to turn the high gloss paint into a semi-gloss and we added a non skid compound to the paint as well and then sprayed on one coat on Saturday and another the next day. This was pretty tough because the paint gun, spraying paint loaded with small non-skid particles would partially clog when the trigger is released and start spitting paint everywhere. We therefore had to plan the path we were going to use, get ready, and spray continuously until the paint pot was empty, only stopping by spraying towards the building walls and disconnecting the air supply. All of this while carrying a bunch of hoses and wearing space suits and not being able to verbally communicate because of the respirators. It was fun.

After 3 weekends of painting the whole outside was complete, there were a few small runs and a few other little imperfections but because I had decided to use AwlCraft 2000®, an Acrylic Urethane paint, the imperfections could be touched up and sanded and buffed out to blend in completely.

While taking care of the touch-up I sprayed on the boot stripe as well

The bottom paint will come later, closer to launch time.