Painting the interior

I decided to paint all the plywood on the inside white, this includes the hull planking, transom, centerboard trunk, and gussets. All the mahogany, including the frames, seats, floorboards, trim (and the plywood deck when it is installed), will remain natural wood.

The plywood planking needs two coats of primer and at least two coats of paint. The mahogany frames are already encapsulated in epoxy and just need some varnish for UV protection.  The deck will be fiberglassed for strength and then also varnished.

To get the hull ready to paint, I removed the deck framing and taped off all of the mahogany that will be clear finished so I don’t get paint on it. If you guessed it took about 8 hours to tape everything you’d be right. I hope after all that effort it doesn’t bleed under the tape, but in any case I’m glad I did it so I didn’t have to carefully cut in the paint around the frame members for each of the four total coats.   

The primer is a two part epoxy (Interlux PrimeKote) which I applied with a foam roller and foam brush. 

I sanded after each coat of primer, which meant I had to vacuum and rinse the sanding dust off after sanding, so it was slow going.

After priming, I painted everything with a coat of Interlux Perfection, the same high gloss two part epoxy paint I used for the outsides of the hull.  I was originally going to use a flattening agent for the second coat to make the paint a semi-gloss or satin, but I liked the look of the full gloss so I painted the second coat the same way.

I also primed and painted the centerboard and rudder as I was doing the hull.

With everything painted, I got to finally remove the blue tape and see what it looks like!


Removing the tape was pretty easy but a little tedious. It took about five hours to remove all the tape.  Fortunately the tape worked well and left nice crisp lines so I have very little cleanup to do.  I’m really happy with the way it turned out and like the look of the mahogany framing against the white hull. I hope the two part epoxy paint will prove durable; I really don’t want to have to tape and paint it again any time soon.


Next step will be to install the deck framing, carlings, and blocking for the deck hardware and to put some tops and fronts on the seat supports (the frame gussets). I’m looking forward to doing some more woodworking! The paint is dry to the touch, but I’m not sure how long it takes to cure enough that I can sit inside the boat to work on it. 

Next Page

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome

Image
Welcome! This is the story of my Glen-L 15 sailboat build.  This is a 15’ long wooden sailboat I am building at home from a set of plans I ordered from Glen-L. It will be my first sailboat so I’m looking forward to learning to sail on it. This is what I hope it will look like when I am finished: This is my current progress: I spent a few weeks looking at several sailboat plans and chose the Glen-L15 because I wanted a traditional Bermuda rig (the classic triangle sail on either side of the mast).  Glen-L also had a long history and great reputation, an active online community, and sold hardware and rigging kits for this boat.  Construction will be plywood sheathing on a solid wood frame.  The links below are in chronological order, as they are best read The Plans My Shop Patterns and Templates 3/4” Plywood Parts Rough Cutting Wooden Frame Members Trimming Frame Members Waiting for the plywood Cutting the gussets Building the frames (finally!) Finishing up the parts T...
Read more

The Plans

Image
The plans were delivered quickly and included Five sheets of detailed drawings Two sheets of full size patterns for all parts A 15 page instruction book Glen-L also published a Building Plywood Boats book that I bought.  I hung up the plans to study them before I started building with a goal of being able to picture the entire build process in my head. It took a full day of reading (and re-reading) the plans to get mostly there.  The plans have a very old fashioned feel to them, which is no surprise given their age. In fact the plans had an almost familiar feel to me. Then I remembered we had a set of Popular Mechanics books when I was a kid and one of them had an article on how to build a boat out of plywood at home. I used to pore over the pictures and instructions in that article and think how fun it would be to actually build something like that. I am pretty sure now that those were Glen-L plans I was looking at way back then, albeit for a different boat (a one-man po...
Read more

Trim and some rigging and fittings

Image
I’m nearing the home stretch, which involves a lot of small tasks. Many of these tasks are just for appearances. For example, I wasn’t careful enough when painting the gussets on frame 5 so they looked kind of sloppy and were bothering me. A small piece of scrap wood epoxied in place cleaned it up nicely though.   The centerboard trunk also needed a cap.  The cap needs at least one opening for the centerboard lines to pass through to use to raise and lower the centerboard. I also cut a good size opening in the aft end of the cap so I could see the centerboard to check it’s height and unstick it if necessary.  I’m also going to attach the centerboard cap with screws but no epoxy so it is removable if I need more access to the centerboard.   The tiller is made out of Sapele too.  I had to deviate from the plans a little bit and added a second layer of wood on the bottom of the tiller so I could lower the hole for the pivot bolt to raise the tiller and prevent it f...
Read more