| Aphelion Refit |
July 14, 2007 After a voluntary day away to allow the new paint additional cure time before proceeding with the next steps, today I worked on preparations for the cove stripe and boottop: the cove needed to be masked off, and I needed to strike a new boottop. I began by cleaning up the painting detritus and removing the plastic from the deck of the boat, since I intended to brush the remaining detail paint rather than spray. |
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Taping the covestripe was a straightforward exercise, with the main goal being to ensure that the new line was fair and of consistent width. I used the molded recess as a guide for the tape, but still found it necessary to fair the tape lines by eye during application. Once I had the tape installed, I sanded the existing paint with 320 grit to prepare for the white final coats, and installed additional widths of tape and some masking paper beneath to ensure little or no chance of any paint drips on the new hull paint. |
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With the cove stripe all set for paint, I dismantled the bulky staging around the boat, since it was in the way of the boottop work ahead. I planned to use a small set of metal rolling staging to paint the cove stripe and no longer had a need for the full staging. Then, I turned by attention to the new boottop. Because the boottop that had existed when the boat arrived was not only stuck incorrectly, but also was rather wavy in places, I had made no effort to retain its original line during hull sanding and preparation. Now, using an old-fashioned--yet extremely accurate and effective--method that I've detailed during earlier projects, I laid out the new top edge for the boottop. At this point, however, I discovered that the line in the hull to which I had taped earlier, during pre-painting preparations, was not planar after all, and furthermore bore little resemblance to an accurate line of any sort. Amidships, the line was an inch or so below where it should have been (had it been planar), and was also different on each side and therefore useless as the bottom edge of the boottop. Therefore, I was forced to strike a second line to delineate the bottom of the boottop as well. Fortunately, the level of the "old" line at the stem and counter was in the correct position, so using these two marks as a guide I simply struck a planar line between them, parallel to the newly-struck top edge. |
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This process took several hours, and put me behind my self-imposed schedule; I had hoped to get the first coat of paint on these areas today, but by the time I finished it was too late to continue, so I left the final taping and painting for tomorrow. The little tape tick marks represent the edge of the new stripe: the top edge of the top pieces is the top of the stripe, and the lower edge of the bottom pieces is the bottom of the stripe. |
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