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Monday

I lightly sanded the first coat on the boottop stripes, then vacuumed, solvent-washed, and tacked off before applying a second coat of the bright red and light blue paints.

Meanwhile, I continued work on the new halyard stoppers on the cabin top.  The epoxy plugs had had the weekend to cure, and now I drilled for the new fixing bolts, and installed the new hardware in butyl sealant, which was a good choice in this instance since the hardware specifically admonished against using other common sealants.

There was a defunct knotmeter transducer in the boat, which the owner requested I removed and patch.

From inside, I removed the plug itself, then cut away the plastic housing and, from outside, removed the through hull flange.  Later, I’d prepare the hole and fill and patch to complete the job.

The original cabin sole, made from teak-veneer plywood, was in poor-ish condition, and the owner requested I replace it with new painted panels.  So I removed the old panels from the boat so I could pattern them and build the new pieces forthwith.

I also removed a stand-alone automatic bilge pump, which I’d soon be replacing with a remotely-located diaphragm pump.

By the end of the day, the new boottop paint had tacked up sufficiently to allow me to remove the masking tape.  Now I’d leave the fresh paint for a few days before I considered overmasking it to paint the white striped between.

Total time billed on this job today:  5.5 hours

0600 Weather Observation:
42°, sunny.  Forecast for the day:  mainly sunny, some increasing clouds in the afternoon, high in the 70s

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Friday

After finishing up some work on another boat, and awaiting a shipment paint later in the day, I turned to the halyard stoppers located on the cabin trunk.  There were four of these, and they appeared original.  The owner requested replacement.

Removal was straightforward.  The barrel nuts on the interior had been painted over, but fortunately came off without issue, and soon the old hardware was removed.

The new stoppers were essentially identical to the old, with the same bolt pattern.  I extend my congratulations to Spinlock for not changing something just for the sake of change, even decades later.

After cleaning old sealant and debris from the deck, I used a 5/8″ bit to overbore the old bolt holes, removing the top skin and core at each location.  The core (plywood) was in good condition in all areas.  Drilling this deck, which was fabricated from Kevlar cloth, brought back lots of memories from my first boatbuilding job in 1990, at a well-known builder that was, at the time, experimenting with Kevlar and E-glass hybrids.  My enduring memory of Kevlar cloth was the fuzzy nature of the material whenever one cut the raw cloth, or sanded/cut the finished laminate, and the fuzzy bits that came up as I drilled into this deck now just reminded me of it all, oh so long ago.

Once I had the holes cleaned up, and masked over the bottom openings, I filled the holes with a thickened epoxy mixture, leaving it to cure before continuing.

My new paint for the boottop arrived just in time, and I looked forward to getting the first coat on.  The owner had a clear sense of the color scheme he wanted, but working with online color samples (notoriously inaccurate) we’d eventually decided to purchase two different shades of the blue he hoped for.  The first shade that arrived looked a close match to the samples, but might have been too light on the boat itself, so I’d ordered the next-darker shade, called Sky Blue.  When this arrived, I thought it looked like the right color for the main, wide stripe of the boottop.  The narrow upper stripe was to be bright red.

After final preparations, and starting with the red on the uppermost stripe, I applied the first coat of paint to the boottop, finishing up with the sky blue on the lower stripe once the red was done.  To my eye this all looked pretty good.

Total time billed on this job today:  3.5 hours

0600 Weather Observation:
48°, mostly clear.  Forecast for the day:  mainly sunny, 76°

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Thursday

Starting from the existing top line, which I’d struck and masked earlier, I worked my way down the various boottop stripes, lowering my beams at each end the proper amount to strike each line in turn.  Once I’d made the tick marks for each stripe, I masked off the line accordingly.

The first new line, representing the bottom edge of the top stripe, was 3/4″ below the topmost line.

The next line, representing the bottom edge of a hull-color band, and the top edge of the lower, wider colored stripe, was a further 3/4″ down.

The final line, representing the bottom edge of the wider stripe, was 2-1/2″ below that, leaving a 1″ band of hull color above the bottom.

With all the masking completed, there was finally a reasonable visual sense of the new striping, and it looked great.

We were still finalizing the paint colors, and awaiting some of the product, so with another boat awaiting my attention I moved on to other things for now.

Total time billed on this job today:  4 hours

0600 Weather Observation:
40°, mostly clear.  Forecast for the day:  sun and clouds, showers in the afternoon, 60s

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Wednesday

The primer had cured overnight, and now I lightly sanded it with 220 grit paper to prepare it for the next steps, and to smooth the surface.  Afterwards, I vacuumed and solvent-washed.

My next steps would include masking the actual stripes below the top line, and I chose to let the primer cure for another day before proceeding with overmasking.  Although there was other work I could do on this boat not related to the boottop, it was a good chance to move forward a couple other projects I had going on outside at the shop, so I spent most of the day on those boats.

Total time billed on this job today:  1.25 hours

0600 Weather Observation:
40°, clear.  Forecast for the day:  mainly sunny, 60

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Tuesday

I spent the first part of the day leveling the boat accurately from side to side, and cleaned up the lower part of the hull to prepare it for the layout work ahead for the new striping.

Afterwards, I set up my special 3D marking system to strike and mark the waterline (aka top of the bottom paint).  At the stem, I used the existing paint line as my mark, as all indications suggested this was a good point.  I had to use more guesswork at the stern, where there was not as clear an indication of the actual waterline.  There was a light scum line on the rudder that helped, and I spent some time searching online for photos of other Laser 28s to help; there were few relevant photos that I could find that really showed me what I wanted to see, which was the stern quarters of a sistership out of the water,  but after a while I got the idea, and made my mark at the aft side so I could set up the second cross beam.  Ultimately, the chosen spot ended up 2-1/4″ above my best guess at the actual floating waterline, which corresponded to the height at the stem.  This seemed to tie in with what limited information I could find online, and from the owner’s recollections.

With the beams set up and leveled at the final height, I strung a string between the two and, in my usual way, marked the waterline on both sides.  Doing this on a boat with a suspect waterline is always a leap of faith, and here was no exception.  Though I knew that the after part of the bottom paint on this boat was wonky, I was surprised to find that the new and level, planar line demarked by the red string was as much above the old line as it was and as far forward as this extended, even though the forward end was at the original starting point.  But the new marks looked good when viewed properly, and created the correct shape for the new line at the aft end, where the flat aft sections of the boat exited the waterline plane.  The idea of this exercise is for the lines to appear visually straight in profile.  In this way, I made a series of tick marks on both sides of the hull to demark the new waterline.

Afterwards, I masked to the new marks, leaving the top edge of the tape at the marks to signify the eventual top edge of the bottom paint.  But all the striping would occur above, and down to, this line.

The new striping scheme the owner requested would include two main stripes:  a wider, lower stripe in one color, and a narrower, upper stripe in a different color, both to match a color scheme he had in mind.  This boat had high topsides that offered plenty of room for striping options, and in addition to properly laying out the new striping, the new appearance would help lower the visual height of the topsides, which as of now were a sort of featureless white expanse.  So with all this in mind, I laid out on a piece of paper my thoughts for the new striping as a mockup, which I then taped in place in a couple places on the hull so I could get a visual sense of how the new stripes worked.    The overall height of the new scheme was 5″ from bottom to top, and would include two hull-color (white) bands to separate the stripes from each other and from the bottom paint as well.

From bottom to top, the mockup shows a 1″ white band; then a 2-1/2″ wide band (light blue); then a 3/4″ white band; and finally a 3/4″ top stripe (red).  The tall topsides offered ample room for the overall height of this new boottop.

Satisfied with my mockup, I prepared to move on with the preparation and marking.  After some thought, I decided to strike the topmost line (5″ above the waterline) and sand and prime the entire area beneath it all at once before doing the final striping.  Although there were two hull color bands in the stripe, the lower one would have to be painted separately anyway, since the position of the waterline had changed and I’d sanded away the mess of the old boottop, and although the second hull color band could have worked as is, on balance I thought the process would work better–and the end result be better–if I didn’t try to tape and sand each line individually from the getgo.  While this would eventually lead to an additional painting step, I thought that compromise was preferable and that sanding and priming the whole area en masse would be faster, easier, and more efficient in the end.

To this end, I moved my cross beams up the required 5″ at each end, leveling them in turn, and then I marked the new top edge of the boottop at this height, masking it off afterwards.  While this looked foolishly high and wide by itself, remember that this is just the top edge, and that the area beneath would be filled with multiple stripes later.

With the whole boottop area now defined and masked, I sanded the area within as required, using 80-120 grit paper.  The existing hull paint was generally in fair condition and suitable for use as a substrate in this case, so I made no attempt to remove it all, instead simply sanding the area till it was properly scuffed and prepared for the work ahead.  Afterwards, I vacuumed and solvent washed the area.  The stern quarters took a bit more work, as I had to clean up the old transition where the old bottom paint had been, and also remove a bit of additional bottom paint at the very stern and just above the newly-taped waterline, where I’d not removed enough during my early round of sanding the day before.

To round out the day, I applied a coat of white primer over the entire boottop area.

Total time billed on this job today:  8 hours

0600 Weather Observation:
40°, clear.  Forecast for the day:  Mainly sunny, high in the low 60s

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Monday

Patience was back for another round of small-ish maintenance and upgrade projects.  To begin, I’d moved the boat indoors a few days earlier.

With a short laundry list of jobs on the work list, including replacing some deck hardware, replacing the cabin sole, and patching an old through hull, I decided to start with arguably the most significant project:  a new boottop and striping arrangement.  The existing boottop was a length of 2″ vinyl tape just above the waterline, and was in poor condition.  Additionally, the waterline was rather oddly arranged at the aft end, and I hoped to redo it more accurately.

A light scum line indicated the actual waterline, which over most of the boat looked to be mostly in a good position about 2″ below the top of the antifouling paint, so I made a couple reference marks for future reference.   Then, I removed the old vinyl with a heat gun; the old material was scarred and scratched, and didn’t pull off cleanly.

The new plan called for a double stripe in two colors and spaced a bit above the top of the bottom paint, and with the condition of the paint and the position of the existing line at the aft I’d have to repaint that lower band in the hull color anyway (white), so to remove the rest of the adhesive I used a sander, cleaning off the remnants and preparing the lower part of the stripe area for new layout and paint.  I also sanded down into the antifouling a bit to clean up that edge and give me a good taping area, and more substantially at the stern quarters where I thought the new lines might take rather a different path.

There’d be more sanding ahead as I started the layout for the new striping, which would take the top edge further up the hull than the original stripe (or my sanding line), but I’d get to that in due course and as needed.  Meanwhile, I ordered various materials and hardware for the work ahead.

Total time billed on this job today:  4 hours

0600 Weather Observation:
40°, windy, cloudy.  Forecast for the day:  Mostly cloudy, windy, maybe a shower, high around 50