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!