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.

Reluctant demolition

This all started with freshening up Ms. Bettencourt's dinged up and dirty dashboard and middle cabin. Then things got out of hand. I had not fully realized the fact that painting the interior of a boat requires removal of countless attachments --latches and brackets, fire extinguishers, bench hatch covers, removable bulkheads, doors and door frames, storage locker doors, switches, gauges, instruments and on and on.

Then there was the rot in the bottom of the little compartment under the dashboard. And now, as the photo at right illustrates, you can see right through that area.






Further pre-paint work led to the inescapable conclusion that no amount of pigment will help the plywood bulkhead separating the steering position and the head. It is badly de-laminated and looks terrible. Just ripping it out is not an option, since there is a major wiring chase and a lot of plumbing on the other side.

The not-so-simple fix for this will be application of a 3/16-inch veneer panel over the whole area. The new panel will dress up the old bulkhead and should strengthen the structure. But, to make it happen, a lot of other stuff will have to be moved, including the shore power distribution box.

Making a pattern, cutting, fitting and fastening that veneer panel will present some interesting challenges.

Meanwhile, the cockpit looks like the aftermath of a burglary.

And, of course. there is a patina of sanding dust fore and aft, all over everything.

Many boats are moving up and down the river.

Ms. Bettencourt has not been out of her slip since June 11.

We need to be on the water.


My friend Major and I talked this week about going down the river and over to Beaufort, SC, after this job is done.

I don't plan to rush the work, but my motivation level is increasing rapidly.

Halting progress spawns new plan

Finally, a workable strategy for the dashboard repaint project:

I have decided to settle about midway on a continuum between perfect and good enough -- let's call it "the best I can do."

Instead of removing all the old paint and underlying gelcoat and filling every tiny little crack, I am sanding the whole surface very aggressively. I have begun with 60-grit sandpaper and my plan is to work down to a very smooth 120-grit sanded surface. All the dings, holes and cracks are being filled, as I work toward the best paintable surface I can achieve.

Life's too short to obsess about perfection.

Chemicals fail...

...and the dashboard is still a mess. The chemical paint stripper I had hoped would ease the job of refinishing Ms. Bettencourt's dashboard doesn't work. The Georgia heat and humidity exceeds the product's application parameters. Temperatures here have been in the high 90s for days. The chemical gel stripper just makes a lot of evil fumes and a few paint blisters, then dries up and hardens. Even night-time applications fail.

There's another paint removal strategy I have hesitated to deploy: The heat gun.  Using the heat gun will require wearing a respirator and other protective gear, guaranteed to be very uncomfortable under burning sun and blanketing humidity.

Rain is expected next week. If things cool off, I'll take up the heat gun and a hand scraper and get back to work.

Meanwhile, thanks for looking in. If anyone has any better ideas for this job, I would sure like to hear them. Please use the comments box below.

Thinking about paint (out on the snapper banks)

I began to sand the old paint off Ms Bettencourt's dashboard this week as a first step toward filling a network of unsightly dirt-catching cracks in the fiberglass surface. This was to be the start of a total refinishing for the whole pilot house area.

After grinding paint off a little less than a square foot of the 40-year-old dashboard, the project was paused for re-thinking.

This paint is highly resistant to mechanical removal. It is harder than Chinese arithmetic. It might yield to a heat gun and a scraper but that will be a last resort, since I fear fumes from blistering coatings would be dangerous in an enclosed space.

The idea of a chemical paint remover is only slightly more acceptable, but that's the direction I plan to take next. There is a gel product that is said to be safe for use on fiberglass. I have ordered a quart for pick up in Savannah Monday.

And since I have to go to Savannah to get the stuff, I might as well go deep sea fishing.

That's why this post is such a short one.

There may be a dashboard stripping progress report next week.

This could take a very long time

Ms. Bettencourt's dashboard looks a little like a Google Earth view of prairie farmland around Pawnee Rock, Kansas. There are strangely regular road-like networks of tiny little cracks across most of the horizontal surfaces.

This is nothing new. This is the way the boat came to me some years ago. And it's not just my boat. I have seen this same phenomenon on a dozen or more Albin 25s.

I thought I had Ms. Bettencourt fixed after a complete repainting about eight years ago. But I was wrong. The cracks reappeared and, once again, began collecting ugly grime.

One correspondent suggested these little flaws are a result of a design that allows too much flexing around the dashboard area. He wrote that he thinks the cracks are in the gelcoat (under my earlier paint job), and the only fix would be to grind the gelcoat down to the underlying fiberglass, then repaint again.

I picked one of the worst areas and started grinding. A problem arose almost immediately. The larger cracks go through the gelcoat and relatively deeply into the fiberglass below. I found a few more than 0.5mm deep. I think that's too deep to grind out.

The cracks are hard to photograph, but if you click to enlarge this picture you should be able to see some larger fisures, including the crevice at the point of this tool.

So, here's Plan-B. I am going to grind off as much as the old paint as possible and clean the network of crevices as best I can. I'll use a dental pick and a Dreml rotary tool with a conical bur bit for the crack work. It will be tedious and slow.

The sanded patch above is about an hour's work with a Dreml oscillating tool. The Dreml out-performs my other sanding machines, but I have to stop frequently to let it cool off.

After the dashboard and surround are sanded and prepped I am going to try an application of Interlux Surfacing Putty  http://tinyurl.com/me3kdhf . The spec sheet on this product says it is compatible with Interlux PreKote primer and Interlux Brightside one-part polyurethane paint, which are the primer and finish coatings I plan to use.

The dashboard crazing is so widespread that, practically, I have little hope of perfection. I'll try to find, clean and fill the largest and deepest canyons and to sand as much as the remaining crazing as level as possible.

More sanding will be required to fair the surface.

This could go on forever.