Project FloatingAbode Diary
1 June, 2001
Third time was lucky - things started to go much better. Ripblast finished the blasting and the whole hull was primed and made weather proof. I then hired a smaller trailer compressor and finished off the painting over the following four days. Here's the pics: The airless spray unit - basically just an air driven piston that pumps the paint to the nozzle in the gun. The spray gun. It's standard practice on narrowboats not to paint the baseplate and so Uisce's was not painted. I think the rationale is that there's not much oxygen to cause corrosion two feet below the waterline and that paint would only get scraped off on the canal bed anyway. This seems to work for a lot of people - there are plenty of perfectly healthy baseplates out there that haven't been painted. Unfortunately, I found that after a year immersed, Uisce's baseplate had surface rust and some shallow pitting. Perhaps it's because there's more oxygen in rivers - I don't know, but I decided that I'd try painting it to put a stop to the pitting and corrosion. Grit blasting the baseplate. Note the blue bottle jack. I used two of these to lift the boat in order to move the trestles. Each can lift 11,000kg. How the base plate looked after blasting. Port bow primed. Pretty in pink. Yeuch.. Close-up showing the sprayed finish. Not pink anymore! The first of 4 topcoats (2 x brown, then 2 x black). This is me putting the second coat of brown topcoat on. Fantastic weather but the heat made it very difficult - hence the shorts. I paid for wearing them: Although airless spraying has little overspray compared to conventional spraying, it still manages to cover things it's not supposed to - such as my arms and legs. I was in agony the next day - the paint had burnt me. As you will see, I donned a tyvek suit after that - not the most comfortable thing to wear when working hard on a hot day but it was far better than the alternative. Onto the black. Mixing up the paint, hardener and then the thinners. Nicely mixed. The airless spray was really quick and easy - you can see here how I was able to walk along the boat and apply a full, even coat over half of the hull in one pass! Very satisfying. Working underneath the boat was not quite as easy - especially when you got a stone under your shoulder blade. Exhausted. Painting the port side black. Nearly there... Done. Except for the final coat: Finished. Cleaning the pump and gun by circulating thinners through them. A rather hot, thirsty, exhausted but pleased to be finished Robin. Neat finish. Staining - this got wet before the paint had cured. Sigma say it won't effect the effectiveness of the finish and it actually comes off if you scrub it and/or leave it in the wind and rain. Worth avoiding if you can though. Now that all the painting was done, I had to start preparing for re-launch. This is the gland packing wrapped around the propellor shaft. There seem to be two schools of thought here - wrap the packing in a spiral or form individual strips of packing into separate rings with the splits 180° out of phase. I decided to go for individual rings. I wrapped the packing around in a spiral as shown here, and then cut it with a fresh stanley knife into the separate rings. Everything in place. As I mentioned in the May entry, I have installed a 35 sqmm wiring bus down the port gunwale and two 135Ah extra deep cycle batteries to supply the 24V lights and pumps. I've connected two bilge pumps up, just in case my gland packing leaks. The domestic water pump and a plumbing run is also installed but I am waiting until Uisce is back in the water to fill up the tank. And finally, we drove to Spain for a holiday via my parent's house in Holland where we spent a few days working on the now rather neglected sailing dinghy (click here see how it used to look). We put enough paint on to seal the wood and then brought it back to the UK. I want to be able to sail it on the river.
