Renewal progresses

Ms. Bettencourt's middle cabin is starting to look pretty good.

The first enamel coat went on Friday over a well-sanded thin primer coat.

The paint is Interlux Brightside, a one-part polyurethane product. You can get an attractive and durable finish with this stuff -- if the paint is applied in successive thin coats, with light sanding between coats.

The side benches, the aft bulkhead, deck and engine box also looked a lot better after the first finish application.






The plan is to let this paint cure a few days, then to give everything a 220-grit hand sanding to prepare for what I think will be the final finish coat.

The final painting and reassembly of the mid cabin will resume around mid-October.

Please check back in late October, by which time I expect the work to be nearing completion.

A cloud of dust...

... and not much more.  A good paint job requires meticulous surface preparation. In Ms. Bettencourt's case, hours and hours of sanding, patching and filling must happen before the top comes off the first can of primer.

We're in the midst of an arid sanding williwaw in the middle cabin. Dust is everywhere. Vacuum cleaner filters are cleaned twice daily, and still it piles up. Particle mask filters are replaced frequently, and still we taste the stuff.

Resolve is diminishing only slightly. We're pressing on. The next report might contain pictures of painted surfaces.

I was right!

In late July I predicted that Ms. Bettencourt's middle cabin rehab project would take a long, long time. I was right. It would be easy to get discouraged at this point, but there has been significant progress.

The following list reveals a slow and steady advance. As of today:

• All of the wood work has been removed and is in various stages of refurbishment
• A new bulkhead panel has been fabricated, painted, fitted and fastened
• The steering station deck panel has been trimmed to fit the new bulkhead's profile
• Surface preparation for the dashboard area is completed and is primer ready
• The shore power panel is reinstalled
• The dashboard storage compartment has been rebuilt
• About 75 percent of other painted surfaces have been washed and degreased

Results so far are not pretty. The photo below, shot with my back against the transom in the aft cabin, could be a good "before" photo in a before/after sequence.

And the following view, looking aft, is just as stark.

More cleaning, and more surface preparation, including sanding and spot priming, will probably take another week -- unless it gets too hot to work.

Notes from the boat carpenter's shop

Yes, Ms. Bettencourt is, nominally, a fiberglass vessel. But there is still a lot of wood inside. And,  a surprising amount of this wood must be repaired or replaced from time to time. Please recall the severely degraded bulkhead between the steering station and the head.

The plywood has de-laminated. Replacing this panel is not an option, since there is a lot of complicated plumbing and electrical wiring on the other side.

So, the plan is to fit a new panel on top of the old. The first step in this process is making a pattern. I couldn't find a big enough piece of cardboard, so I used some resin paper off a roll, with a cuff folded on the bottom to help stiffen it up.

Since the resin paper is more flexible than cardboard, it is easier to work with in tight places. Scribing and marking around the perimeter and various obstacles resulted in a serviceable pattern.

A lot of clipping and nipping after repeated fittings, then transferring the pattern to wood (which somehow needed even more tweaks before it fit), results in a replacement panel, shown on the left below, along with some other stuff that needed painting.

More wood items requiring replacement include the hinged companionway hatch boards over the doorway that leads to the forward cabin, and a rotted-out part of the compartment under the dashboard. I used the old wood as patterns in both cases. These parts will get three coats of sanding sealer, sanded between coats, before application of white primer and at least two topcoats.

There are also four fiberglass and epoxy-covered 3/4-inch  plywood deck panels that need to be cleaned up, sanded and repainted. 

So, work on the middle cabin rehab project seems to be picking up speed. I expect to be scrubbing down all the paintable surfaces soon to remove as much of the diesel vapor film as possible.

Then, it will be sanding and masking to prepare for a first coat of primer paint.