Rob and I finished the week by building four big wood gantries. These had two purposes – to support the mast while we painted, and also to create a structure within the building to contain the sanding mess.
And, like the boat, now our mast was shrink wrapped into a structure that would contain all the sanding mess that we (the royal we in this case) were about to make.
This is what it looked like inside, with the mast sitting on sawhorses before the stripping and sandblasting started. The boom and spreaders are on the floor, along with the radar mount and bracket for the hard vang, all which needed to be stripped and repainted.
The boom had a surprising quantity of things that had to be pulled off before it could be repainted. I had never thought much about it before, but now we have a big box full of parts that need to be replaced, and some were very resistent to being removed after 40+ years of service. There are control lines for the mainsail reefing, but also the outhaul for the main uses sheaves that are now in need of replacement. Happy to know we have found The Guy in Port Townsend who builds custom sheaves for these and the ones in our masthead.
Even the spreaders provided challenges before stripping and repainting. These lights were put on during our last refit and have never worked. We’ll find a better set this time.
In the meantime, I opted to decline the Tyvex suit for paint stripping, and started putting the interior of the boat back together. There were lots of parts and pieces and literally hundreds of screws that hold up the overhead interior, but I was super happy to spend my days fighting with plywood and screws and not sanding dust.
Michael used a burnishing machine to strip the paint from the open areas of the mast, boom and spreaders. They both used Ethan’s air tools and sandblaster to get the detail work done on all those parts.
When the guys declared the sanding and stripping complete I went back to the building, and this is what our structure looked like.
They were cleaning out 300 pounds of sanding material, and getting the tented area ready to start painting.
All of the pieces are now stripped to bare aluminum. You can see here where stainless pices were attached that there is some pitting, but that is to be expected after 40+ years. Even the best tape between such dissimilar metals won’t protect the weaker of the two. But we trust Ethan to know that some epoxy and our primer will repair these small pockets of corrosion.
The dust is cleaned up, the sawhorses are gone and the mast is suspended from the gantries. The thing about aluminum is that you have a very short window before it starts oxidizing and won’t hold paint. If that step isn’t done right the paint won’t stick and all this will be wasted time.
We started with an acetone wipedown. Then Rob & I worked with red scrubbies to scuff the surface, followed by blowing off the dust. There is a 45 minute window before the aluminum starts to oxidize again, when we have to get the primer on. Ethan & Michael followed behind and applied primer to all four sides of the mast, including inside the track. It was a very intensive process, getting this first coat of primer to stick which will allow the remaining coats of paint to stick. We were all so glad when this was done!
Ethan & Michael continued to roll on the primer, four coats total on all surfaces.
Here it is all primered and ready to sand.
We used a guide coat again, and sanded it all down totally smooth.
We enlisted some local help from my neice’s wife’s best friend Bree. She is an absolutely good sport, hard worker, and great for my struggling attitude at this time in this very long project. We three managed to get all 60′ sanded in two days.
Ethan & Michael scrubbed out the building and cleaned up all the dust. Then it was time to paint. He chose to use Epifanes polyurithane, which is applied roll and tip. They put on three coats and we decided it didn’t need to be sanded and a fourth coat added.
Worth the time and effort? I definitely think so! That green further down the pic on the left no longer cleaned off, it had become part of the old paint. Now comes another hard part, reinstalling all the hardware.
