Monthly Archives: June 2014

Battens

23 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in Junk Rig

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Battens on a junk rig are a really big deal. Unlike the somewhat flexible strips found in most Western rigs, junk rig battens are stiff, and more substantial in terms of both size and weight. They hold the sail down when it is reefed, generally without any ties at all, and support the sail in much the same way as in fully battened Western sails, but more stiffly. They are versatile, so that if a batten breaks, or a sail panel tears, neighboring battens can be lashed together for continued sailing under reduced canvas. Having all these jobs and capabilities, it comes as not such a surprise that making junk rig battens can be a bit of a job.

First off, I want to say that it doesn’t have to be this hard. Two pieces of bamboo, lashed together with overlapping narrow ends, can be wired to a sail right through the fabric. And the sail doesn’t have to be complicated either – it can be cut out of a tarp off the shelf at the local discount store, and still sail around the circumference of the British Isles. Vincent Reddish did that, and was quite happy with the results. Still, there’s something to be said for the more involved version, taking after suggestions found in the book Practical Junk Rig.

Sails from the sailmaker just sort of happened, after much thought of tarps and whatnot. Any part of this effort that doesn’t have to involve Suzanne and Theo doing more stuff is a great thing. And now we have really nice sails. To go with those sails, battens that won’t tear them up make sense. That means no rough batten ends, and no splitting bamboo. Furthermore, the entire point of the junk rig is to make sailing easier. Equipment in need of repair 50 miles offshore in a howling wind is not an example of fulfilling that goal! So it’s sturdy aluminum battens, with nice rounded plugs in the ends, with grooves in the plugs to catch the little lines that stretch the sail out taut along the battens, and hold the battens in place. When Stuart, of Dabbler Sails, makes other traditional small craft sails, he makes regular batten pockets with grommets as shown in the photo farther down, one grommet on the edge of the sail, and one on the end of the pocket. That sounded good when he suggested it, so that’s what we have. I think it’ll be very workable.

Another word about the plugs. I looked all over on the Internet for something basic along the lines of a rounded plastic end plug that would fit this aluminum tubing. My Internet skills could be better – I’m sure they’re out there somewhere. Fortunately, among Theo’s very many skills, she is experienced with woodworking using a lathe. Which she has in her shop. Next thing you know, here we are with beautifully turned wooden plugs, just right for the job. The grooves went in by hand, and then they all marched off to the paint shop.IMGP5582

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Now the plugs have been caulked into most of the tube ends, first one end, and then some care to make sure that the ones in the other end go in aligned with the first ones. The funny thing was that yesterday, when we did the second ends on the mizzen battens, after they were done we left them outside on their sawhorses for the caulk to set. The sun was quite warm, and when Suzanne went out later, one of them had been popped out a quarter of an inch – a solar powered popgun! Fortunately it squished right back in, with no problem. We are refraining from drilling holes in the tubing, so they won’t get any water in them – we’ll see how the airtight situation works out over time.IMGP5853

Some folks dispense with plugs entirely, using a machine screw through each end of the batten and a grommet in the appropriate spots in the sail, to hold the sail and batten in place. The trade-off is not being able to adjust for stretch, and potential harsh bits to do with the screws or open ends. I’m also rather fond of the idea of keeping water out of the middles of the battens. So for all the many reasons, we have gone ahead with plugs.

The other issue with junk rig battens is where they come in contact with the mast. This is a potential source of both chafe and noise. People do different things about this, and taking from various peoples’ strategies, we now have both vinyl tubing around a portion of each batten, and seatbelt webbing stitched to the part of the pocket that will rub against the mast. The vinyl tubing, where it was cut, felt like a potential source of chafe. It is surprisingly hard, and a little bit sharp. Carving down all those edges seemed like a potentially difficult and ridiculously time-consuming task, so instead we now have rubber o-rings pushed against the tubing ends, providing a bit of a cushion. These o-rings are from McMaster Carr (nope, not receiving anything) whose website provides detailed descriptions of which materials are suitable for which uses. The orange silicone rubber is good for saltwater – we’ll be finding out how it does with UV, which wasn’t mentioned for any of the choices.

Today we got to start tying the mizzen battens into place, which was enormously satisfying. Small stainless rings are lashed to the forward ends for attachment of batten parrels, which are lines that hold the battens near the mast; the rings will also serve for attaching various bits and pieces to do with other lines that help keep the sail where it belongs front-to-back. The goal is to make rigging on the water, after launch, as simple as possible. Instead of lots of knots that require detailed description for helpers, lines will have quicklink attachments to rings, or other easy connections. The knots that put all this together can be tied here at home, in a more leisurely way, all ready to go when they are needed.IMGP5880

That’s about it for the battens. For those who are looking for scantlings, this aluminum tubing is 1 1/4 inch outside diameter, and 1/16 inch wall thickness. This is roughly correct for the 175 square foot mainsail (following examples found at the Junk Rig Association website), and seriously overbuilt for the mizzen. Going smaller for the mizzen would have only reduced the weight by about four pounds total, and would have been incredibly inconvenient, and expensive, as far as ordering tubing. Going this way, we got one main batten and one mizzen batten out of each 24 foot length. If the mainsail had 12 foot battens this would not have been such an issue, but with 13 foot battens we had to go to the longer length pieces, etc., etc…

Some folks have built a junk rig start to finish in a week – it’s a temptation! But the process we’re in is enjoyable too, and I keep holding the image in my mind of going back out around the outside of Cape Cod – with the whales – and straight across to the central coast of Maine. If this rig works out, it should be a good match for that kind of undertaking. Battens are a substantial piece of the overall project, and it’s wonderful to have them coming together.

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News from the Paint Shop

19 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in the boat

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Almost every project going on here makes a run through the paint shop. Or several, depending on how many parts a particular project is made up of. Suzanne gets all credit for every bit of painting, and today we got a photo of many completed items. It’s a handy opportunity to show what’s been going on around here. First, a picture from some time ago, while things were in progress:
IMGP5247Various parts are laid out on the workshop table. Some are obvious, like the tiller, showing it’s heavily scraped area where it rubs on the movable slide board in the cockpit. The chunky thing in front is cargo boom jaws, explained more in a moment. Other odds and ends have to do with the rudder stock repair, and resulting changes in the stock/tiller connection. There is also a short drop board, which has two jobs: holding the bracket for the gimbaled propane cookstove, and new this year, having a proper gasketed lip to make a little barricade for unruly bits of water sloshing toward the interior of the cabin, while underway with no big drop boards in place. At the back left, those are not boat parts – pieces of the house have been patiently waiting their turn.

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The completed paint collection includes the new version of beaching legs, for another try this year. These boards have multiple uses, besides holding the boat up when the tide goes out: they will be lee boards for secure sleeping in the starboard berth, and the two pieces will also go together as one, with velcro straps or lashings, and fit into the cargo boom jaws, as the cargo boom. The cargo boom jaws rest against the mizzen mast, on top of the partners (with a parrel line around the back of the mast). The cargo boom is attached to the jaws by that heavy pin on the left, and a block and tackle goes on the upper end of the boom. The cargo boom is supported at the upper end by a spare mizzen halyard, and together the whole business can be used for lifting heavy stuff like spare anchors from cockpit lockers. This is experimental, but I’m hopeful…

The tiller is finished, and Suzanne and I had some fun setting up a piece of leather and lacing it on, to protect where the underside of the tiller was getting scraped. Leather for this kind of project, which was originally a little bit hard to find, came from The Wooden Boat Store, where it is sold primarily for oar leathers. Off and on they have “scraps” available, at a much more manageable price. We did a similar leather project on the yard last year, where the yard had been getting worn against the mast, and it worked out well.

The odd shaped thing at the left of the completed paint photo is the rudder stock “clamp,” which will reinforce where the wooden stock (now repaired) had deteriorated badly from strain with the tiller connection. Now, instead of a large bronze pin through plain wood, there’s a completely different arrangement. Because of the rudder stock “clamp,” the tiller connection has needed to change, and will have bronze straps (one shows in the first photo), and the pair of wood spacers that show in both paint shop photos. The end result will be overbuilt, but sturdy! And removable, for dropping the rudder in the future. When this all goes together, after the rudder goes back on the boat, there will be a blog post devoted to the subject. But if anybody is curious now, there’s a series of photos that can be seen here: http://smu.gs/1hn0kDE

Also new, and somewhat experimental, is the belaying pin collar for the mizzen mast (shown below), to provide places to tie off the numerous junk rig and other mizzen lines.
IMGP5648There used to be a big plastic cleat on the mast, held with two screws, which has now been taken off. I’ve been averse to putting more screw holes in the mast, so the collar is going on with wedges, and is braced by that little stop block that uses the old screw holes from the cleat. Seizing will be going around the wedges, to keep them from going anywhere… It all feels pretty firm now, but we’ll see what happens in use. Belaying pins made from dowel, with little tubing stop-collars, will go in those holes. They too are just out of the paint shop, and are shown in the earlier photo.

With all this going on, I guess it’s obvious why the boat has not made it to the water yet! But on the other hand, I’m having a really nice time being home for a bit of summer. It’s satisfying to work on this stuff, even if a little alarming to have so many experimental bits running at once. It should make for an interesting month, as the parts get to actually go together.

junk rig, but which one??

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Junk Rig, the boat

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One of the biggest challenges in doing a junk rig conversion, for me, was the very beginning: deciding which design/sailplan to follow. Reading up, there are a number of choices, and then once a particular design is selected, there are more choices, including sailcloth, batten material and method of attachment, and specifics of overall rigging, as well as the question of camber, which is the curved shape that can be built into a sail, to help with going upwind. My process of resolving those questions went on for years, literally. Now that the selections have been made it’s quite a relief, and it seems time to share what I’ve learned about the deciding factors.

The book Practical Junk Rig, by Hasler and McLeod, provides an overview of the possibilities, and the website junkrigassociation.org has descriptions of those possibilities and more, including recent developments that have come up since Practical Junk Rig was first published in 1987. For a beginning on diagrams and photos, see: http://www.junkrigassociation.org/sailplans_early_days and http://www.junkrigassociation.org/sailplans_current

For a while I thought, oh I’ll just copy what Dave and Anke (at triloboats.com) have on their current boat… until it turned out that I would need something close to a 30 foot mast. Oh well! Then it looked like the Reddish rig, with its traditional character and proven, low-tech possibilities, could be a good fit. For a while there was a detour, and I was intrigued with the split junk rig, designed by Slieve McGalliard – who also did that nice article about yuloh design. I’m still intrigued, but the mainmast on AUKLET is too far forward for that one. Along the way it was pointed out to me (thank you Dave) that the most sail area for the shortest mast would come from the Reddish rig, and making low mast height a priority, in the end I came back and settled on that one.

Things are always so much clearer after the fact, and I now realize that the straightest line through junk rig decision-making (at least for me) is indeed the mast question. Mast height rules out some junk rig designs and enables others, and mast position does the same. Some people change the location of the mast on their boat, but I didn’t want to get into that. With AUKLET, having the mizzen mast provided some room for adjustment as far as location of sail area, so except for considerations with the split junk rig, mast height was really the deciding factor for the overall design. Now here we are, with a Reddish rig in progress.

Then there is the question of size, once the shape of the sails has been decided. Determining sail size is related to mast height, desire for sail area (and what the hull can carry), and locations of booms and sheets, as well as the relationship of the forces on the sails to the forces on the hull. Some tinkering goes into figuring this all out.

In the design process, it’s important to keep the combined center of effort – the “balancing point” where the wind pushes, for both sails – in roughly the same place as for the original rig. Sorting that out for this project involved starting with a scale drawing of the hull and masts, and then making cardboard cutouts, to scale, of potential sails. (It’s probably important that the cardboard is something like what comes inside shirts, and is not corrugated, so there’s no question of uneven weight distribution within layers.) Balancing the cardboard cutout on a pin serves to roughly locate the center of effort for each sail. Then the combined center of effort can be determined by first working out the square footage of each sail (counting squares inside a scale drawing on graph paper helps with figuring this without using big geometry skills.) Next comes drawing a line between the two centers of effort, and measuring along that line proportionally, related to the ratio of the areas of the two sails; this yields the location of the combined center of effort.

We had the original combined center of effort for AUKLET from the plans for the Glasshouse Chebacco, but you could find this from a scale drawing of the original sails, if you needed to, by making another set of cardboard cutouts from the original sail design. We actually did this for the Peep Hen a few years ago, though never took it further than the cardboard stage. However you get it, it’s handy to have the originally designed center of effort so that you can make the center of effort for the new sails line up with the original.

In the end, for the AUKLET junk rig design, Theo and I made an entire array of sizes of cardboard cutout sails, to try out the different possibilities both by eye and for calculated balance. It was pretty entertaining – it felt like being a kid with paper dolls cut out from the Sunday newspaper, but way more fun! Because of the yawl rig, when the potential mainsail pulled the combined center of effort too far forward it was possible to increase the size of the mizzen to compensate. We had everything from a 10 foot boom on the mainsail up to a 14 foot boom, and eventually settled on 13 feet, and a 6 foot boom for the mizzen. (Boom length determines measurements for the rest of the sail.) The sail area for this final arrangement is 175 square feet for the main, and 37 square feet for the mizzen. This is more than the original design, which was 149 and 27 square feet, respectively. Phil Bolger, designer of this boat, used to write about that nobody just sails nowadays, so it’s more appropriate to design sail area for those who motor in light winds, and the Glasshouse Chebacco rig reflects this approach. Myself being a bit of a throwback, as far as the motor question, increasing the sail area has seemed appropriate to the actual use of the boat.

Still, I’ve gone back and forth on the sail area question, and my thinking is continuing to develop, and to change back and forth, on this subject (see writings by Sven Yrvind for reasons for smaller sails). While I was swung toward the “wishing for more sail area” side of things, the time for an actual decision arrived, and now we have a really big sail! Necessitating a mast the height of the original Chebacco design, at 19 feet. These last two years I’ve been sailing with the borrowed short mainmast, which is 16 feet. I like that a lot, especially for things like squeaking underneath closed drawbridges, and the relative ease of stepping and unstepping the mast. Now that the junk sails are built, and the new taller mast is coming soon, I’m committed, but my thoughts keep going back to the benefits of a short mast and smaller sail. It’s a little late for a change, at this stage! It’ll be fascinating to see how the increased sail area feels – worth the compromise of height, weight and bulk? For extra headway in tiny wind? And just how much extra headway? I have no great need for speed, but reliable movement along the shore when the wind is minimal may turn out to be worth the trade-offs.

Regardless of the issue of mast height for the new sail, something had to be done about the overall mainmast situation. The one that I borrowed from the Peep Hen (a much smaller boat) is tapered aluminum, 3 inches in diameter at the base, with 1/4 inch wall thickness. It’s had a good deal of strain and flexing, over these last two years, and there are issues about work-hardening, with aluminum masts, that can lead to breaking. It’s possible that everything is fine, but I haven’t felt confident. As near as I can tell from material on the Junk Rig Association site, appropriate, somewhat conservative scantlings for an unstayed aluminum mast for this situation are 4 inch diameter and 1/4 inch wall thickness in the lower part of the mast, with the diameter tapering higher up. The best I’ve been able to come up with is an aluminum flagpole that is 4 inches in diameter with 3/16 inch wall thickness, tapering above 11 feet to about 2 inches in diameter at the top. Five inches in diameter at the base would be considerably stronger, but won’t fit in the existing partners, and they would be complicated to change. As it is, I think that the 4 inch version will certainly be fine in the early part of its life; if I really love the rig, there is probably another mast change somewhere in the future.

Other big decisions have been sailcloth, and the camber issue. Both of these questions completely stopped my process for a long time also. I originally wanted to go with acrylic sailcloth, such as Sunbrella. This would mean expecting stretch, and because of that, the sail would more closely resemble traditional junk sails in Asia, but would still avoid the mildew issues of cotton. This approach would have been taking a chance, but I rather liked the idea of the adventure. Then Suzanne, with a good practical eye for details of a question, looked at my sample of acrylic fabric and asked “how heavy is that going to be when it’s soaking wet?” That moment was the somewhat sad end of the acrylic idea, but I’m really glad that the question came up before I had a giant, soaking wet sail on my hands, too heavy to move. Maybe not a problem at first, when the fabric still had all its water shedding treatments intact, but surely as time went on.

The other thing that happened about sails is that I came upon a sailmaker with some experience with building “Western” junk sails, on this side of the Atlantic! This would be Stuart Hopkins, at Dabbler Sails. (You can see his work at http://www.dabblersails.com .) Commiserating together on the question of fabric, and on the question of camber, we settled on Dacron sailcloth, and a very small amount of camber in the lower four panels of each sail (stated for the record, Stuart heartily advocated for more camber – if this flatter design doesn’t work out so well, it’s entirely my responsibility!) Above the lower four panels, the top two panels are left completely flat, for heavy weather. It’s an experiment, all the way around, and we’ll see how it goes.

The argument for camber has to do with upwind sailing ability, which has generally been not so good for Western versions of junk rigs with flat sails. I’m intrigued by the theory that “fanned” sails, such as the Reddish rig, also develop camber as they twist. One can opt for an assortment of control lines, following traditional Asian practice, to make adjustments for optimal performance. That does assume that you know what you’re doing… Or are willing to take quite a while to begin to figure it out. But it does seem possible, and I’m looking forward to trying.

Along the way in the planning/design process, I’ve also given up on the idea of bamboo battens, going with the highly recommended aluminum tubing version, in pockets. There is a source of construction-quality (as opposed to garden quality) bamboo in eastern Massachusetts, and I was hopeful for a while. But it turns out that, issue #1, there’s a lot of finish work involved in bamboo battens – wooden plugs for the ends, and varnish, and then, the consideration that really sealed it, issue #2: that the traditional way to make bamboo battens work out well (preventing splitting) is to soak them in seawater for three weeks before beginning the finishing process. (Thank you Lesley, at http://www.huntingjunks.org) Here we are in Holyoke, about 80 miles from the nearest seawater. It could’ve been done, but overall there is the question of exactly WHEN we would like this project to get on the water… So aluminum battens it is, and they are in fact almost complete at this writing.

That’s about it for the major design questions. There are just reams of excellent information available at http://www.junkrigassociation.org and quite a bit of it is accessible to nonmembers. Joining is low cost, and opens up all the rest, including PDFs of all past newsletters. The book Practical Junk Rig, by Hasler and McLeod, is also loaded with outstanding, detailed information. This includes everything from junk rig details, to exactly how to go about making a mast out of a tree from the forest – a real mast, for a big boat. It’s an expensive book, but encyclopedic, in what it covers. (Nope, just like always, not receiving anything for any of the business, organization or book mentions in this post.)

Beyond the design question, there’s the concrete progress. Presently, the sails are complete, and here; yards have been built, epoxied, and painted; the battens are cut to length, and wooden end plugs (turned, grooved, epoxied, and painted) are ready to be caulked in; a belaying pin collar and belaying pins have been made for the mizzen mast, as a place to fasten the zillion lines for the mizzen sail; and mast hardware, loads of line, and assorted other necessary bits, are accumulating in corners. On it goes!

bottom paint, part two

06 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in the boat

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This process is so enormously routine for a lot of people – but it doesn’t seem that way as you’re figuring it out! Jacking the boat up, ensuring that it will stay vertical, and doing it again in order to shift wood blocks under the keel, all feel like an enormous big deal. I’m happy to say that the boat is indeed still vertical, and the wood blocks are now repositioned under the keel, allowing for the remaining repairs and painting to go forward.

The second round of jacking went smoothly, putting to use everything we learned from round number one. Stern lifted first, maintaining weight at all times on both stern jack stands, then up with the jack at the bow. Blocks of wood positioned between the hull and the outer bunks for additional stability and safety, then reaching under to move the 4 x 4 blocks under the keel. Then everything in reverse: blocks at the bunks removed, bow jack lowered, then stern jacks, until the weight of the boat was once again resting primarily on the keel. Assorted fiddling with side supports, and cushions kept between trailer guide-on posts and hull throughout the process.

Since the last writing, we added extra supports at the stern, shown in the top photo, so that the boat would be stable without the wood blocks at the bunks. This has eased some of the pesky issues with the painting. I would have sprung for regular metal boat stands to do this, but the position of the trailer rails wasn’t going to allow for orienting the angled boat stands correctly. It was a little bit fussy doing the wood version, because of wedges for the funny angles where the pieces fit together, but in the end it has been quite sturdy, and pushing on the side of the boat yields no movement whatsoever. That’s been satisfying!

Then there’s the paint. Regular bottom paint would be a lot easier, and if we had used it this process would have been done a while ago. Or, if we had a big, heatable shed, even the very particular ePaint would have been done long before now. As it is, I still think ePaint is worth it, and the good weather this weekend should mean that the hardest part will be done, and we’ll be able to put the boat back down on the trailer.

The paint we are using is EP 2000, which is one of the newer non-toxic antifouling paints, from the company called ePaint. (As always, I’m not receiving anything for mentioning this product by name.) I like this bottom paint because once it is on, it’s completely non-toxic, both for small creatures in the water and for people. No worries about letting the boat go down in the mud, or on a sandbar, and no concerns about rubbing off algae, or touching the paint with bare skin when swimming. It’s also nice for trailering, with a hard surface that doesn’t rub off on the trailer, and it’s unaffected by sitting out of the water for long periods of time. It works by reacting with UV light in sunshine, creating hydrogen peroxide, which the sea creatures don’t like. Algae is not perfectly deterred, but rubs off easily while swimming. My experience has been that barnacles do not grow on it, except for two or three on the entire boat over many months, and they come off easily using just a fingernail. That’s if there’s a decent amount of paint.

Last year, it was enough of a challenge to get paint on the boat at all, wherever it was possible to reach while the boat was resting on the trailer. The theory was that there was still a certain amount of paint on the hull, and leaving the unreachable parts with just the old paint would be a good test of how much paint thickness was needed in order to prevent growth. The paint is not ablative (the kind of bottom paint that continually sloughs off, exposing fresh surfaces), but in the process of the chemical reaction that creates the hydrogen peroxide, it gets “used up,” and gradually becomes thinner. We started originally with an alternate color for a marker coat, and that gray was beginning to show through the white, before painting last year. You can see this in the post from 2013 titled “kneeling camel,” when the boat was dried out on its side. (http://sailingauklet.com/2013/08/04/kneeling-camel/)

The results of the test are that more layers of paint are a good thing! Everywhere that got the new coats of paint last year made out fine over the course of four months in the water – and the places that didn’t, that were down to pretty much one layer of marker coat, eventually had a nice crop of small barnacles. They were easy to take off with a plastic scraper, but there were lots of them. Hundreds. This was the main inspiration for all the boat jacking this year (well, this and the big down-to-bare-wood ding in the keel, unreachable against the trailer).

Then there is the subject of ePaint’s fussy application requirements. At least 65° temperatures, and 50% or less humidity, for many hours after you put it on. On the bright side, if the temperatures are hot – 80 to 90° – the required number of drying hours is shorter. But still, in an outdoor New England setting, if you want to go sailing early, meeting those requirements can really set you back as far as timing. The folks at the company recommend having the painting professionally done… alas not so easy, so many miles from the coast.

[Note added after posting: actually, I misunderstood the temperature/humidity guidelines, in the process of following the table for required drying times. The temperature must be at least 60° throughout the drying time, and the humidity must be below 85%. Effectively, if one is doing this outdoors in the Northeast US, the daytime temperature must be warm, and the humidity low, in order for the paint to be truly done drying before the temperature drops below 60° overnight, which it almost always does in the spring.]

Last year was also a test of whether or not we had achieved something close enough to the various application requirements to work. The answer is “sort of.” One side of the boat worked out fine. But something must have been less than ideal on the starboard side (oddly, this was the warmer, sunny side of the boat in the driveway), because swimming with a scrub brush, taking care of algae at the water line, white stuff was coming off. Eventually I figured out it was the paint, but only on that side of the boat. I could scrub all I wanted on the other side, with no sign of sloughing. For the rest of the season, I cleaned algae on that delicate side very gently, and the paint agreed to stay put, continuing to prevent barnacles from moving in. It’ll be really interesting to see how things go this year – especially because some of that paint was of course still left (though less, after regular prep sanding), and we have now painted over it. Hopefully this has glued the remainder back in place! We’ll be finding out…

The other thing we’ve learned, through observation of the original paint that was done during construction, is that this paint really cares about being on top of either its own primer, or some other epoxy finish. Where it was painted on a bare bronze fitting, and then, as we found by jacking the boat up, where it was painted on bare wood on the bottom of the keel, it had cracked and curled, coming away from the surface. This is of course no fault of the paint – it’s a standard thing, for paints to need primers that they like. But it was interesting to see that it does indeed really matter. The guidelines actually say that it can be painted directly on bare wood, with a thinned first coat. We have no idea if that was done for sure, originally, but it probably was – and yet, the paint was busy removing itself. Coating the wood with epoxy feels like good insurance for the wood, as well as likely to be helpful for the paint.

This paint is also considered pretty toxic during application. It is water-based, but according to the can, a Tyvek outfit, real respirator, and goggles, are considered appropriate precautions for the painter. This has something to do with zinc…

So now the bottom of the keel has had dings repaired, remaining old paint scraped away, and a coating of epoxy. Most of it has been painted, and now that the wood blocks have been shifted, the remaining spots have been scraped and epoxied and are ready for their own turn, to be done along with some more coats on the rest of the “trailer section” of the hull in the next few days. What a production! Suzanne is the brave soul with the scraper and the paint roller. “Gratitude” is such a thin word, in the face of all that!

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