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.

Middle cabin project begins

Ms. Bettencourt's center cabin, the area that provides interior access to the rest of the boat and from which the vessel is operated, is in need of major refurbishment. The overhead and bulkheads were painted when the new top went on more than a year ago, but the dashboard, the seats and the deck can only be described as nasty.

The dashboard is the trickiest part of the job, since all the electronics, other instruments, controls, gauges and switches must be removed before the surface can be prepared for repainting. That part of the work started yesterday and was finished today.

Tracing, disconnecting and tagging electrical and antenna connections was a tedious task. This photo shows the electrical panel and the underside of the dashboard. All those colored tags will help me get everything back where it goes at the appropriate time.

I was able to lift and block up the main instrument cluster and the engine shift and throttle controls without having to make major disconnections. That's a feature I'm glad I thought of when  Ms. Bettencourt's instruments and controls array was restored about 10 years ago.

So, here's what it looked like this afternoon, following removal of the steering wheel and everything else that needed to move. If you click to enlarge this photo you will be able to see how I have the main instrument cluster blocked up with wood scraps so I can clean, sand and paint under its edges.

While this doesn't look too bad from a distance, the following shot, closer in and from a different angle, reveals why refinishing is a priority.

Enlarging this picture will show some of the cracks, dings, dirt, epoxy splats and other imperfections I expect to fix in coming weeks.




Re-doing the dash will also present an opportunity to play with the placement of communication and navigation devices that have been added around the steering area piecemeal over the years.

Ms. Bettencourt won't be going anywhere until all this is refurbished and reassembled. There's a lot more work to be done in the middle cabin, but the dash is the most difficult and the rest should follow fairly rapidly.

"How high's the water, Mama?

...six feet high and rising ...."  It has been raining here all month, and not a day goes by without those lyrics from a Johnny Cash ballad popping into my mind.The water level in the Savannah River outside our back door seems to have stopped rising, but the water velocity has increased substantially.

The river is booming past our dock at about 46,400 cubic feet per second (according to the nearest US Geological Survey stream monitor gauge), bringing with it large quantities of logs and other flotsam.

The usual summer flow rate here is about 3,800cfs. This time last week, Engineers were releasing 16,000cfs.

That soggy and un-mowed  swatch of green in the foreground of the photo above is part of our lawn. The floor of the gazebo to the left in this photo is usually about eight feet above the water.

And it continues to rain and rain and rain.

All of the three large dams upstream from our home are full to over-full. The Army Corps of Engineers, manager of the dams in the Savannah River watershed, is releasing water as fast as it can without causing undue downstream damage.

In a report yesterday,  Engineers estimated it will take three weeks to a month of water releases at the present rate to bring the reservoirs down from flood to storage levels. That estimate assumes rainfall will moderate soon.

Army Corps of Engineers photo

Also yesterday, about a thousand people showed up at the Thurmond Dam to witness a timely test of the structure's 23 floodgates. The floodgates apparently worked satisfactorily.




All the rain has caused the atmosphere to be really funky inside Ms. Bettencourt. The relative humidity seems to be approaching mushroom growing levels.

I have been fighting mildew on the overheads, bulkheads and decks. Condensation under the bunk mattresses has become such a concern that I will bring the mattresses into the house if it ever stops raining. The pilot house windows and all the under-seat lockers are open, with a large fan running in the forward cabin. Perhaps air movement will help abate the fungus.

Painting inside the pilot house cabin in such weather is out of the question, but I have begun some halting surface preparation.

Even a little sunshine would be very motivating.