The Refit

Solitude III is now over 8 years old.  Through the years, wear and tear have accumulated: bumps and bruises from encounters with docks, fading paint from being stored outside, even a few imperfections that lingered from the original build.   Looking at the general condition of the boat, it was clear that is was time to do some heavy maintenance.  And what better year to tackle such a project?

The jumping off point for the refit was when I decided it was time to repaint.  The sun has beat down on Solitude's hull for years.  The shiny red still looks good from a distance, but the fading and thinning of the paint was clear up close.  How hard could it be to repaint?  Rough up the hull with sandpaper, mask stuff off, and slop on a couple of coats of fresh paint.  If you have ever undertaken any project before, you know where "How hard could it be?" leads.

Looking over the boat, the list got longer.  

- There were some scuffs and scrapes that would need to be filled and faired with epoxy.  

- If I was going to epoxy things, I might as well fix those one or two fillets that have bothered my eye forever.   

- Some odd discoloration in the fiberglass covering the transom developed in the first few years.  The damage didn't extend into the wood, but the fiberglass would have to be removed and replaced to fix it.

- On the topic of R&R-ing fiberglass, last year, I left the boat without it's cover for a week or so.  You won't believe it, but a jay, seeing its reflection in the glossy varnish on the companionway hatch, decided to go ballistic, pecking hundred of holes into the 'glass.

- The boom gallows had met with some damage some time ago, and while fixed and functional, a brand new one was needed.  

- And much, much more...

Since getting loaded on the trail, the boat cannot fit back in the garage.  Since I would be doing painting, I knew I had to get the boat inside and protected from dust, birds and other "outside" stuff.  I look for a while at renting a storage unit, but for the cost of that I decided a better option was to buy a 10ftx20ft tent and do the refit under the bigtop.  

Boom Gallows

Before really committing to project fully, I decided to start with an off-the-boat project, replacing the boom gallows.  The original was two pieces of 1" mahogany, glued together.  For the replacement, I found a nice piece of 2" sapele.  I dug out the original plans, and laid out the shape on the new board.  I cut it out, drilled the holes for the stanchions and routed out the hole for the stern light.  Sanding, epoxying, more sanding and multiple coats of varnish ensued.

Damage to the old gallows

New sapele gallows.

As a side note, with the offcuts from the both the new and old gallows (don't ask why I kept the old offcut for 8 years), I built a little planter.  

Planter made from old and new gallows offcuts

Tabernacle

The aft face of the tabernacle had split at some point, so I built an all new one.  One side of the old tabernacle became the tiller for my Eastport Pram.

Transom Fiberglass

Transom damage.  The discoloration is very deep.

A year or two after finishing the boat, areas of deep milky white hazy developed in the fiberglass on the transom.  Trying to figure out what was going on, I had an email exchange with John Harris, who was puzzled at the damage.  I thought it was likely UV damage from a tie that the varnish got a little thin, but he did not think UV damage would run so deep, and theorized that something must have gone wrong with the original cure.  I suppose this is possible, but I am unsure why it took multiple years to develop.

In any event, the cure was to remove and replace the fiberglass.  This was the point of no return, as the first step was to sand a perimeter all the way through the fiberglass in the area that would be hidden by paint.  I could have gone all the way to the edge of the transom, but decided to leave a 1" perimeter of the old 'glass to overlap the new 'glass onto.  sanding the perimeter convinced me that I did not want to sand every square inch of fiberglass off the transom, so I switched to a heat gun and a large putty knife.  I used the heat gun to warm and de-bond the epoxy (careful not to roast the wood underneath) and the putty knife to then pull the fiberglass away from the hull.  It was better than sanding, but still not a fun process.  I l

Removing the transom fiberglass

et everything cool and then sanded the residual epoxy off, exposing bare teak for the first time in years. 

A sheet of fiberglass and several coats of epoxy later, and the hull was again complete.  Sanding the newly fiberglassed transom was far more nerve-wracking than I remember it being the first time.  The last thing I wanted to do was sand into the fiberglass so that the white weave would show through the varnish in the end.  Speaking of varnish, that would have to wait.

Fiberglass off, down to the teak.

Re-'glassed

FILLETS!

As anyone who has ever built a boat knows, there are always some imperfections that will bug the builder until the end of time (and probably nobody else will ever see).  One of these for me has been the fillets in the cockpit between the transom shirt and the seatbacks.  They never really got shaped and sanded right, and it has always bugged me.

I decided to finally fix this by applying a fresh fillet over the top.  Since this fillet didn't have to be structural, I used easy-sanding microballoons as a thickener.  This process went well enough that I decided to go hog-wild and "fix" several more not-quite perfect (though not bothersome) fillets, some deeper gouges, and places like the cockpit storage cubbies, the surrounds of which just didn't get sanded right to begin with. 

Prepping the Hull

Plenty of wear and tear over the years

Scuffs and dock rash in the paint. 
You can also see just how faded it was getting 

Needless to say, all of the hardware had to be stripped from the hull before painting, along with the spars and rigging.  At one point I imagined that I would just tape off some of it but removal went smoothly enough that everything ended up coming off.  I carefully pulled each piece, labelling it (just in case) and
taping it's fasteners to it.  Then came the fun part.  Nearly everything was bedded using silicone sealant.  This obviously had to go before painting, but removing it is not fun.  It doesn't sand, and solvents don't do much.  It took a lot of picking with a fingernail to clean off of the silicone off of everything.

Removing the bootstripe

And the registration numbers. 
Even these were getting beat up.

The old boot stripe (a vinyl tape) had to be removed, along with the registration stickers.  To prep for painting, every square inch of the hull had to be sanded -- topsides with 120 grit, bottom with 80 grit.  This processes was took the boat from an otherwise passable appearance to looking like a construction zone.  With the boat on the trailer, sanding the bottom paint proved to be a major challenge.  I became clear that in the end the boat would have to be jacked up out of the keel trough and that the trailer bunks would have to be removed one at a time to allow for sanding and painting each side of the bottom.  That would have to wait, however, as another challenge presented itself.

I then started sanding the boat.  She has every bit as much surface area as when I originally built her, and at times it seemed maybe a little more!   As I sanded, the boat took on first a dull, and then a mottled appearance as I sanded through the top coat and in some cases all the way to fiberglass.  Some of the places that were in better shape just needed to be scuffed up.  Others need serious elbow grease.   Of course this is where perfectionism must reign, as every defect left behind will be visible (to the builder's eye, at least) forever.

Sanded down.  This looks terrible, but is
the foundation of a good paint job.

There were several deeper scrapes in the hull side that needed to be filled with epoxy.  There were also some spots on the edges of the port rail where (either in the past or now) I sanded clean through the fiberglass, so that had to get patched.  There was also a section of the cabin top where the paint had developed dozens of tiny bubbles.  I thought maybe there had been some surface contamination, but in  sanding the paint off, I decided the more likely culprit was that I hadn't originally sanded the surface quite smooth, leaving little divots of unsanded epoxy that the paint did not properly adhere to.

For a while I had fooled myself into believing that I would be able to tape off the original waterline to avoid having to level the boat and remark it with a laser level.  In the process of sanding, however, the original paint line was either erased or obscured too much to be useful.  Also, had always thought I had slightly missed-marked the original waterline just a bit.  It, and the boot stripe have always sloped ever so slightly downward.  That, combined with the 1" boot stripe ducking completing under the chine aft, has always made the boat look like it is squatting tail down in the water.  Correcting this sudden became in-scope for the refit.

Leveling the boat was nowhere near a trivial task.  The boat sitting on a slab of pavement that slopes both down and to the side.  The four corners of the trailer would have to be put on jack stands to give it a solid foundation, and then the jack stands would have to be carefully adjusted and shimmed until the boat was level -- I set a tolerance of 0.2 degree, which required some very fine adjustments indeed.  This was trouble, but the real challenge was figuring out which point on the boat to make level.  I think I originally used the bottom of the keel, but that does not work with the boat on the trailer!  The tops of the floors are parallel to the waterline, but not practically accessible when you are trying to nudge the trailer up an down fractions of an inch.  From the plans it looked like both the cockpit sole and the seats were parallel to the waterline.  Naturally, in reality, these did not prove parallel with each other, and in the end I decided to split the difference between the two, with both within my 0.2 deg tolerance.  This resulted in the aft end of the waterline moving up just over a half inch from its original position, which seemed to be about right.

Repairing the nose block

I used the laser level to remark the waterline.  I also decide to abandon the vinyl tape boot stripe and switch to a painted stripe, 2 inches vertical.  This makes the strip itself vary in width with the changing angle of the hull, and extra wide as the bottom of it wraps around the chine, but sets the upper and lower edges at constant waterlines, which is much better visually.

With the boat jacked up, I also noticed the the leading edge of the keel had been beat up.  I refaired this with silica-thickened epoxy and a layer of fiberglass.

Bottom Paint

Setting up the painting tent.

After what seemed lite decades of sanding, I finally started applying new paint, starting with the bottom.  To keep the boat out of the weather and dust while I was painting, I bought a cheap 10-ft x 20-ft tent online.  I threw up the tent up over my boat and got started.  There's nothing more rewarding than applying paint.  

Painting the bottom while on the trailer translated into painting one side at a time; to access the whole bottom I had to remove a trailer bunk and leave the boat leaning against the bunk on the opposite side.  

Under the bigtop

Things started off well, only to fall apart with I was 75% done.  I had prepped the bottom for repainting had two fresh coats on one side and one coat on the other . Painting goes pretty fast and I was excited to get the bottom done so I could move on to the sides, so I took advantage of the work-from-home world and ran out to paint during lunch. I must have been in a rush, or thinking about work, or something, because I opened the can of Pre-Kote and happily slopped it on top of my coat of Trilux33. I was about most of the way done when I figured out what I was doing. A few panicked emails to Interlux ensued, and I was finally convinced that the only option was to sand it all off and start again. Let me tell you, on its own, Pre-Kote dries and sands wonderfully.  On top of bottom paint, it was a nightmare.  I let it dry for a few days and it still clogged up the sand paper instantly.   I fought with it for some time, and burnt through a massive pile of sandpaper, but 

Masking off

finally got back on track and finished painting the bottom.

While painting the bottom, I also has the new bootstrip masked off and got it primed.  The topcoats would come after the whole side was primed and sanded smooth.

Bottom paint and bootstripe primer

Hull Paint

Primer

I decided that I would re-prime everything rather than just put fresh topcoat on it.  One reason for this is that when I originally painted the boat, I realized that I didn't have enough gray primer for two coats on the hull, so my first coat was white primer, followed by gray.  Sanding down the gray before painting, the high spots would sand all the way through to the white, leaving streaks of white primer.  The Brightside topcoat is very thin, and even from day 1, there was a hint of the mottled undercoat visible through the paint.  This only became more pronounced as the paint aged and faded.  Two fresh coats of gray primer in the refit went a long way to fix this, as did the five, count 'em five, coats of Fire Red Brightside topcoat.   

Fresh coats of Fire Red.  The wider, painted bootstripe can also be seen

Painting the topsides

For the topsides, I made several tweaks to the original paint scheme.  The brown/tan/burnt orange color had always been quite a bit darker than my original vision, so I selected a lighter shade, Bristol Beige, for the cockpit and anchor well areas.  I also wasn't really ever happy with how far (or not-far, rather) I wrapped the white into the cockpit, so I decided to extend that a bit. 

The revised paint scheme, now with Bristol Beige.
This is close to m original vision.

As before, I knocked down the sheen of both the white and the tan with flattening agent.  I had long since lost my original ratios of paint to flattening agent, but came pretty close, mixing it 1/2 part flattening agent to 3 parts white, and 1:1 for the tan. 

By the time I started painting the topsides, it had been nearly two months since I first started peeling the fiberglass off the transom, and fall was beginning to set in.  As the daylight hours waned, it became a race against the clock -- would it all get finished before the temperatures dropped.  Evening after evening, I would rush out to wet sand and apply another coat of paint.  Nights that required  more work, such as re-masking often resulted in the last of the paint being applied by lantern light.

I was able to start varnishing while painting the interior beige.  Ideally, I would have liked to revarnish the companionway, spars, and grab handles, but by this point the available after-work daylight was too short, and the weather window was closing too fast.  So, I settled for applying some touch-up coats to the rub rails and multiple coats to the transom; springtime will bring another chance to touch up the varnish in general

Re-rigging

After completing the painting and varnishing, it was time to bring the boat back into sailing form. 

After spending hours scraping old silicone sealant with my fingernails when I was removing the hardware, I decided "never again."  In re-rigging the boat, I bedded things with butyl tape wherever possible.  I only ended up using a little silicone sealant where things were held with screws instead of bolts.  This seemed to add quite a bit of time to the whole process; reinstalling all of the hardware took several evenings and a full Saturday, far longer than I recall it taking originally.

Upgraded: new LED nav lights

One errata in the manual that has caught many a PocketShip owner is the dimensions for the hole for the thimble for the centerboard pendant.  The manual gives a dimension that is too small for the specified thimble, and having been lulled into a false sense of security by the excellence of the rest of the manual, many a builder has drilled the hole without confirming that it is the right size.  For the past eight years, my thimble has hung precariously, half wedged into the hole.  With all the work that I had done on this project, I finally decided that the time was right to fix it!

Despite carefully labelling and storing everything when it was removed, it always seems like things go back together slightly differently than they came apart.  The stays had to be re-adjusted, every halyard was completely and incomprehensibly knotted, some fasteners were the wrong size...  It all came together in the end, though.

The final details were installing the registry numbers and a new vinyl name on the transom.  I have not yet had the chance for a post-layup shakedown cruise, but am looking forward to seeing my refreshed boat out on the water again!