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Project Log:  Sunday, October 6, 2013

After covering over the doorway to the pilothouse, and the open top of the after steering room, I moved on to the next inexorable step as I closed in on final preparations for priming:  sanding.  Over time, the previously-sanded deck areas had become stained and dirty, and I'd also applied some fine epoxy filler to a few last-minute areas that now needed to be sanded flush.  For the best substrate, I thought it'd be best to do a quick cleaning pass with 120 grit paper to clean up the decks and smooth out the few filled areas.

As it turned out, this was straightforward and quick, given the cursory nature of the job.  The "dirtiest" areas, such as they were, were the sidedecks, but even sanding these areas didn't require much effort or time.  Once I'd sanded all areas as needed, I vacuumed and solvent-washed to prepare for the work ahead.

         

         

Now that the new sealant around the freeing ports had had plenty of cure time, I moved ahead with masking off these openings, closing them off from the outside to prevent overspray out onto the surrounding hull areas as I worked on the decks.  At each opening, I masked around the perimeter, at the edge of the deck area, then covered the centers with paper and tape as needed.

    

         

After more thought and rumination about the deck painting procedure over the past months than I could put to words, I moved forward with final plans for a multi-stage approach to painting the complicated deck.  With no way to reach all areas from outside the boat, and the challenge of the bulwarks and deep sidedecks, my plan called for at least two separate stages:  first, the pilothouse overhead, coachroof,  cockpit coamings, and pilothouse sides; then, the sidedecks, cabin trunk sides, and bulwarks, hopefully in a single stage.  The cockpit, as I'd determined earlier, would be its own separate entity sometime later on, along with the locker changes I planned there.

To this end, I struck an arbitrary tape line down the sides of the cabin trunk and pilothouse, about an inch below the top edge of the cabin sides.  The position of this line wasn't important or final in and of itself, as first I'd prime the areas above this line, then, later, retape and work on the areas beneath, eventually feathering and overlapping the primers between these two areas; the topcoats would present their own challenges and taping procedures.

Below the tape line, I started covering the remaining areas with tape and paper to protect them during the work ahead, working my way along the port side and part of the starboard before running out of available time and gumption in the afternoon.

         

         

         


Total Time Today:  4.5 hours

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