Paint in the bilge can result in paint flakes/pieces in the bilge pump. My bilge not painted nor do I intend to paint it.

 

I am a fan of Bilge Kote. With good prep and application it is incredibly durable. At least that has been my experience.

 

Rustoleum. Been using it for 25yrs. One of the cheapest paints on the market and I've never seen it flake.

 

Is that a lasdrop GEN 2 I see?????

 

One caveat about bilge coatings-- do not assume that the factory painted it.
Our present boat, built by Ericson Yachts, and our prior boat, built by Hinterhoeller yachts, both have their bilge areas gel-coated.
Because it was brushed on, probably with some wax added for curing, it is not a shiny slick surface. It's more of a mat surface finish.

I like it because with some roughing up with 40 grit I can epoxy other parts to it for full strength.

You might find that your interior "hidden" surfaces are also poly gel coat.

 

I don't think it matters which bilge paint you choose, if you've done the prep correctly. There can be everything from wax to oil on your bilge paint or the glass itself and all that's gotta go before you paint, or you will end up with a bigger mess than you started with.

 

I would imagine the prep would predict success of the paint job much more than the quality of the paint. I've never painted a bilge, but, I would imagine it would be really difficult to prep on some boats. If there is rough roving, effective degreasing may be difficult, and sanding would be nearly impossible.

 

I've had a lot of luck with Bilgekote too, and I'm afraid to say my prep was minimal. Just cleaned the surfaces, that's all.

Shame the color range is so limited.

 

Capta is right - prepping a bilge for paint is a lot of work because of all the goo that gets in it. Clean it again & again with degreasers - Spray Nine works well as do Zep products.

Finally, when you think it's clean, wipe it with solvent - acetone or lacquer thinner.

After that, spritz it with water and see if it still beads up - it probably will.

If so, rinse & repeat until it doesn't.

You don't want to sand it before it's squeaky clean or you'll sand the contaminants into the surface.

Not doing this is why you see flaking bilge paint.

 

Unfortunately, the followup on this thread is that I had a really bad experience with Interlux's Bilgekote. Quite honestly, it's exactly the kind of bad experience I was trying to avoid by asking this question in the first place.

Posting this really bothers me, as I'm worried that someone is going to come forward with something like "didn't you know that you have to kiln fire to get a good coating" or some other accusation that I applied the product wrong. I've gone over the process I followed multiple times and even re-did the entire application on a test piece to see if I could get a better result.

Unfortunately, I'm led to the conclusion that this product just isn't very good. More details in the video.

 

I your video I see a can of 2333n solvent. did you use it in the Bilgekote? Bilgekote should be used with 333 solvent not 2333n which is for two part polyurethane paints and epoxy . it will slow the drying time down to the point where it will not harden up for many months.

 

Bill,
Did you sand all the surfaces prior to applying bilgekote? It doesn't hold unless surface is sanded and cleaned with solvent.

 

About a jillion people have asked a variant of this same question since I posted that video.

The answer is yes. I sanded all the surfaces and cleaned them with acetone before applying the primer. Then I sanded the primer and cleaned with acetone before applying the bilgekote.

I understand that surface prep is the most common reason for paint failure. I understood that prior to starting this paint job, and thus I've been meticulous about surface prep.

*shrug* at this point, I'm assuming I somehow got a bad batch of paint ... as unlikely as it seems. Nobody else has complained of problems. Many people have reiterated that the product worked well for them. Every piece of advice so far has been "better surface prep" without finding any flaw in the surface prep that I _did_ do.

I have to assume that this is just one of those weird cases where super bad luck screwed things up somehow.

 

That is odd. Even with a rush job on prep always had that stuff dry hard as a rock.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G935A using Tapatalk

 

That is odd. Even with a rush job on prep always had that stuff dry hard as a rock.

The only other thing I can think of ... nobody I've discussed this with has used the product on Epoxy (only polyester or bare wood). Per the instructions, use on Epoxy requires priming, so it's possible that either there's something wrong with the epoxy+primer+bilgekote use case, or somehow I screwed something up in that application (which still eludes me).

The places where I applied it to bare wood worked great. I didn't have anywhere that I applied it to polyester to compare.

 

Did you use pre kote primer on the epoxy primer before the bilge kote. yes their instructions suck but if you read between the lines you will see that any time you paint over epoxy. be it clear, primer or 2000e you should use pre-kite one part primer before any of their one part paints.

 

What I applied was West Systems Epoxy, then Interlux 2 part primer, then Interlux bilgekote.

Are you telling me that I need another product between the 2 part primer and the bilgekote? I did not see anything in the instructions to make me believe that was necessary. If that is the case, I feel like I'm better off just using a good 2 part polyurethane topcoat paint than trying to go through all those steps.