We're ready to flip the boat!

I didn't really think that I would be able to repaint the interior of the boat so quickly.

It took just five days. It is undoubtedly very much easier when the hull is upside down, and using a long handled roller made it quick and easy to paint the inaccessible parts such as the transom.

So today, having surveyed the third coat of eggshell and concluding that it is good enough not to need a fourth coat, I realised that we are ready to flip her upright again.

Now, Mrs Boatbuilder participates in Oxford Art Weeks every May, meaning that the household and grounds are totally taken over by the exhibition and visitors for two whole weeks. Nothing else has any chance of happening.

The art weeks here open in the second week of May, so that leaves just the coming weekend to assemble enough volunteers to carry out the flip.

It is really short notice so I will see how we get on. Otherwise it will be June before I can start work on the topsides, which will be very frustrating.

So, with nothing more to do in the boat I decided to fit the wheels to the build cradle end pieces.

Here I am fastening wheels to an end piece with lag screws.

This close up shows the heavy-duty braked castor wheels that I used on the build cradle so I could safely and easily move the boat around the workshop.

That didn't take long and then they went back inside on the bench to await next weekend.

With a bit of luck!

Cabin Interior | Repainting

It was time to apply paint inside the cabin.

I thought I had used a quality paint the previous time but I was advised by a professional decorator that it wasn't that great.

So this time round I chose the best I could find. This is it.

It is Dulux Trade brilliant white eggshell for interior use, solvent based.

I first painted the stringers and carlins with a brush, to see how the paint felt.

It was very thick and hard to apply straight out of the tin, so I asked the Dulux people if I could thin it.

The rather grumpy lady who runs the store said to use white spirit but no more than 10%, or I would "destroy the integrity of the paint". Now, we don't want that to happen, do we?!

A test with 5% white spirit added to the eggshell caused the paint to flow very nicely, so that's what I did for the entire repaint.

I used the same roller sleeves that I used with the Epifanes yacht paint, by Rota. They are excellent. This is them.

Two rollers were needed, with a long and a short handle. Here they are.

Two coats were applied and at time of writing seem to have done the job.

This is the centreboard case, seen through a porthole.

And this is the roof.

I will see what it looks like when dry but I am really pleased with how this turned out.

Now I need to organise the boat flipping crew …

Postscript

Having said that I was happy with the paint, a close look the following day revealed that there were still some small patches where the eggshell had not fully covered patches where I had sanded through the old paint to the substrate.

The Dulux eggshell claims to be "Self Undercoating", so I didn't bother to prime these patches. I should have known better!

So a third coat was applied and it looks much better now. Sometimes I have to remind myself that perfectionism is not my friend …

Cabin Interior | Preparing For Repaint

It was nearly time to flip the boat upright again, but before I did that I decided to repaint the interior.

The white paint had turned yellowish and no longer looked smart. It would be much easier to refresh inside the cabin while the boat was upside down, so that's what I did..

The first task was to lightly sand all the old paint. My Festool sander was too big to use inside the boat, so I looked around for a small cordless palm sander.

The smallest I could find that were up to the job were all 125mm, and I opted for the DeWalt random orbital sander simply because I already had a charger and two batteries that I could use to power it.

This is it.

It comes with a dust collection bag but a trial proved that it was ineffective and still created a lot of dust, so I connected it to my vacuum cleaner with a conical connector, like this.

Some tape prevented the connector pulling loose from the sander. As here.

This was a very successful modification. I could now sand most of the interior with minimal dust creation.

I taped the floorboard and centreboard case edges and around the inspection hatches to mask them off.

Here is the centreboard case.

This is the inspection hatch in Bulkhead 2.

And here are the floorboard edges.

Then I sanded as much of the cabin that I could reach with a P80 and then a P120 grit.

I could easily reach most of the cabin with the sander, but the storage compartment and the transom were out of reach.

So I made a sanding tool by taping a sheet of medium grit nylon abrasive pad to a long handled roller arm. This is it.

This was very effective in lightly sanding impossible to reach places.

Inevitably I sanded through the paint in some places. This is one in the corner of the roof.

I am hoping that two coats of a quality paint will suffice to cover everything. We will see!

Build Cradle | Reassembly

When we moved the boat out of the workshop onto its trailer I dismantled the build cradle.

I put the two cradle ends behind my workbench and put the spreaders and support blocks in the scrap pile.

I did consider scrapping the cradle ends but thought if I ever needed to put PocketShip back inside for rework I would need them, so I kept them.

That was a very sensible decision, because we will soon need another build cradle when we flip her upright again!

The spreaders had long since been cut up and recycled so I made a new pair. Here I am cutting them to length.

I searched through all of my many boxes of scrap and found all the support blocks from the original cradle.

Here are the new spreaders and the old blocks.

I drilled the spreaders for screws using the pillar drill to ensure the holes were perpendicular, like this.

Then I took all the parts outside and stood the cradle ends on a pair of tables.

All parts were marked up to ensure they were correctly reassembled, like this.

I carefully screwed all the pieces back together, using a big roofing square to make sure everything was at right angles.

This is the reassembled cradle.

I will fit the wheels when we flip the boat.

Lastly I removed the spreaders and put the parts safely back inside.

That was fun!

Dorade Boxes | Stripping Paint

I had decided to strip the interior of the Dorade boxes while the boat was upside down.

I just thought it would be easier that way, and it would not matter if stripper and paint leaked through the drain holes onto the already stripped upper side panels.

I made up a varied tool set of scrapers, brushes and scourers to do the job.

Here they are.

As usual I used an eco-friendly, water-based paint stripper to do the job. It worked just fine. See previous posts for details.

It turned out that a stainless steel scouring pad was the most effective way of removing paint.

Here we are working inside the cabin.

One bucket of water is for washing the scourer, and the other is for rinsing the sponge used to wipe off the dissolved paint.

The mirror is vital for seeing into and around corners.

Tedious and messy but not that difficult, and it's done now so not something to dread at a future date.

Portholes | Stripping Caulk

I posted last May about removing the portlights when the boat was back in the workshop for repainting.

One of the portlights was very difficult to remove.

This was because I had used old caulk to seal this particular portlight in place. The caulk had partly cured inside the tube and although it dispensed easily, it set to a hard and inflexible consistency which refused to release the portlight.

I eventually prised it loose with an old screwdriver but this left a thick, solid ring of hardened caulk on the inside and the outside.

It looked like this.

No solvents that I tried had any effect, so it would have to be cut away.

I used a small slim-bladed pocket knife and a small Bahco scraper with a new blade to do this.

Here they are.

It was painstaking work, taking care not to damage the hull but also removing every trace of the old caulk.

It was successful eventually, and a wipe with some solvent left a clean surface ready for paint.