January 1, 2016
Nomad 15
Friday
After giving the hull paint a full extra day to cure (almost 48 hours total), I was looking forward to to finishing the boottop, which required plenty of masking work to get ready.
As usual, I began with a narrow strip of special vinyl fine-line tape (1/2″) at the top edge of the boottop, which would help provide a crisp, clean paint line there. Then, I applied a layer of 1″ masking tape, covering as much of the vinyl tape as possible because overspray on the vinyl, which was non-absorbent, would tend to run down onto the boottop below, and, when cured, would also tend to create annoying feathers of paint that didn’t stick to the vinyl and therefore wouldn’t peel off cleanly during removal.
With the top of the stripe now taped off, I spent another hour or so draping the hull from the gunwale to the boottop with plastic sheeting and then, because I never trust the plastic entirely like this, a 12″ wide strip of masking paper at the lower edge, just to safeguard against any of the boottop paint getting on the new hull. It seemed excessive, as always, but the peace of mind was worth the extra effort. Covering the entire hull in order to spray a 2″ stripe seemed ridiculous sometimes, but there you are.
To complete the masking, I covered the raised forward bulwarks with more paper and tape.
After final preparations, I applied three coats of Alexseal off-white gloss topcoat to the boottop. This color would tie in well with the off-white color of the original decks, which were in good-enough condition and would stay as is.
Total time billed on this job today: 3.75 hours
0600 Weather Report:
25°, clouds. Forecast for the day: Partly sunny, 36°