Intermission..

Spring sun and white hull 

Some more pics from the project, enjoy.. These pictures with the sunshine were taken last Saturday before I started to work. Solid five hours of sanding and some backache later nearly all of the paint has gone.

More progress

Adding it up, I have now gathered about 30 liters of scrapings and sanding dust (yes, I even collect that too).

Not much left here 

The sides and lower surfaces of the bottom lists are by far the most difficult areas to clean. I can pretty much get nearly all of the paint off by applying innovative sanding techniques with the random orbital sander. The rest come off with a drill and some abrasive add-on's.

Some work to be done

All the black is now gone

Surpricingly the stickiest paint seems to on the area right under the blue stripe. This puzzles me since the surface is nice and vertical and there is not much curvature on it. But still the paint seems to stick like nothing before.

The area where the keel meets the bottom is a pain in the neck to get clean. The surface curves so that you really cant get to it with a scraper or a sander. The only way to get it clean is to use a two sizes of "sanding cylinders" with a drill. First you use a smaller one and get most of the stuff away from the bottom of the curve, then take the larger one and finish the area. If you try to get it all with the larger one you end up sanding everything but the bottom of the curve.

These have gone too

I still need to get rid of the blue stripe. I will raise it about 3 centimeters and also raise the antifouling a little. In between there will be a nice clean white stripe and the raised blue line will be black.

Generator powering the lights, sander and charging batteries for cordless drill 

My trusted small genset powering all the hardware I had with me. I know that the white extension cord is not approved for outdoor use but as it was -13 Celsius out there there was no real threat of the snow suddenly turning into water.

Cold, dark and working on the boat 

My home away from home. This is the place where I think I have spent about 50 or so hours so far. There's enough snow on the sides to give shelter form the winds so I wont freeze totally.

Epoxy and powdered glassfibre

Epoxy for the  small fixes 

Today I decided to think ahead and get some of my favorite stuff; SP-106 epoxy. This time I opted for the fast hardener since I will be doing the work in less than optimal surroundings. This meaning that the I will try to get as much filling done as soon as possible in low temperatures. I really want the bottom to be reasy for barrier coating as soon as spring and the temperature kicks in, so I think that I need to get creative and build somekind of shelter witha a heat source for the areas where there's a need to do larger fills. Anyway there' s still time since it's still minus degrees for a long time.

I have already used this stuff in my other boat, which is a 17 footer that is undergoing a major renovation (stringers, transom, etc). The SP is easy to use and so far I have been more than happy with the stuff.

The plan is simple, grind out all bad stuff and small cracks and fill them with a paste made of powdered glassfibre, fillite- microballoons and silica- ash to stop the mix dripping before it sets.

I need a snowplough, really..

There was a snowstorm last night and I was anxious to get to the boat to check the situation. High winds and light snow meant that the boat covers were clean but the ground was not. I was the first one in the harbor and tried to get to the boat only to find that I could not. Got nearly stuck in the 30-40 cm of fresh snow. If you closely you can see that a Skoda can actually make a bow wave and it was trying to get on top of it, as in trying to get planing...