During the morning hours, I worked to prepare the decks for priming.  I removed the tape and plastic that I'd installed to protect the deck while I primed the hull, and then thoroughly cleaned the deck again:  vacuum and solvent wash.

Afterwards, I repaired a few masked-off areas that had been damaged during sanding or from the vacuum, and applied some masking paper again along the top edge of the hull just to keep serious overspray off the hull as I sprayed the deck.  Since the hull primer was so green, with under 24 hours' cure time, I used a very low-tack blue safe-release tape to secure the paper and tape off the hull-deck joint. The tape was so low-tack that it barely stuck at all, but it didn't really matter if a gap opened up during painting.  I just wanted to avoid the bulk of the overspray.

Finally, I did the final solvent wash with the Alexseal wipe-down solvent and tacked off.

Since, once more, I'd have to walk on the decks in order to spray the centermost areas of the cabin trunk and cockpit, I laid out some more masking paper along the port sidedeck, so that my boots wouldn't track dust or dirt onto the deck.

Once I'd gotten three coats on those areas, I removed the paper from the sidedeck and began spraying the three required coats on the other deck areas where I could reach from the staging.  Fortunately, the finish primer, being thinner and more volatile, tacks far more quickly than the high-build, so the time between coats could be reduced accordingly, thereby speeding up the whole process somewhat.

<Previous | Next>