Mid-Week

My typing is usually a bit slower than my thinking and Wednesday seems to be one of the words I always have to correct so you may notice that it is now named mid-week – which I never have to correct. I’m lazy that way! Chilly weather has come in today although a month ago we would have welcomed upper 40’s – it’s all relative, at least the slight prediction of rain for today has been changed and we can get through the week and hopefully get everything done for week end deliveries. The barrier coat job was finished up yesterday and I found Carlos out de-taping the boat and moving jackstands to get the patches. Since this barrier coat has more than 8 hours of dry time we will have to sand those areas before putting the primer on – the time line for a chemical bond has been exceeded but it can’t be helped since you can’t move the stands until the paint is dry. The owner likes to do a little work on the boat as well so he came by to put on zincs and put the zinc spray on the props. Follow up on deck project – today is clean up the dust day. You can see what I was talking about when I mentioned not getting things totally flat. You just don’t want to take off that much teak because you are shortening the life span of the deck. A good cleaning with the Teak Brite will make this look like new. He will now be filling any seams that are opened up. Old Paint – that’s the name of John’s Shields. The repairs are under way on this. Since we use Awlcraft instead of Awlgrip on this, it is able to be sanded and blended into the existing paint after a good cure time. Sometimes I have good ideas, this one falls under the category of  ‘we’ll see’. This boat had a lot of cracking in the bottom paint. I found that it wasn’t flaking off the boat but we didn’t want to do aggressive sanding with all the varnish work going on. My solution was to use Pettit Tie coat with a spreader to work it into the cracks and crevices. Since it is a sticky primer it should work. We have avoided the build up from the primer plus paint and effectively filled the voids. We’ll see next year whether it was a permanent repair or a stop gap. Personally I don’t think they will come back.