Let there be paint

even if it is primer. Thank Gawd it's not BLUE either! :-)

I decided awhile back to give this Bluewater Marine epoxy paint a try. It's $40 cheaper than the Interprotect 2000 I've used in the past. It's also a barrier coat like Interprotect.

 

I figured this would be the time to try learning to spray paint as well and bought an HVLP sprayer from TCPGlobal on eBay. It has the 2.0 venturi nozzel specifically for heavy epoxy primers.

It took me an hour and a half this morning to wipe the whole boat down with acetone to remove any oil, wax or grease from the hull just before I started painting. Started mixing the paint and made a helluva mess as you can see in the top pic! ;-) Doh! I knew this heavy primer would have a lot of solids in it and used a paint mixer on my cordless drill. Didn't know it'd fly out all over the goddam place! *ugh* Anywho, got that cleaned up and paint mixed. It has a 15 min induction time before you can start applying it.

Now I've never really spray painted anything like this before so I knew there would be a bit of a learning curve. Youtube provided some good tips on how to setup the gun and spray pattern. I did notice the spray pattern was really small and there was nothing I could do to change it. I figured it was the heavy primer that was causing it. I started on the transom.

If you look close you can see some tiger striping. The spray pattern wasn't much more than 2-1/2" so with overlap I was getting about 1-1/2" per pass. It took forever to get the transom and half the port hull side done. Almost 2-1/2 hours later I had to stop for lunch.

I thought I had cleaned the paint gun well enough when I stopped but that wasn't the case. I just couldn't get it working right and figured it was all gummed up inside so I put it aside and broke out the foam rollers.

Things progressed much faster now. I got trough the remainder of the port side and the entire stbd side in about an hour and a half.

There was just enough paint left in the tray to put another coat on the transom. Tomorrow I'll hit the keel & bottom panels. I hope to get at least two coats on them. This stuff is dry to the touch in 2 hours so timing should work out really well. I'll put anti fouling only on the bottom of the keel. That's all that'll be needed before I flip this thing over.

Nice bum!

I took some video of the spray painting. I don't know how it turned out. I might have a look at that later and put something together.

Standby....