[jharrison]

My old bottom paint is almost completely gone, with about 50% of the fiberglass showing. I am thinking that it probably would be best to remove all the paint, and start over with a barrier coat and then bottom paint. Does this sound like the right idea? What is the easist way to remove the old paint? Anyone have any experience with a good chemical remover or anyone tried sandblasting?
Thanks,
Justin Harrison

 

[VIEXILE]

We tried marine stripper on an old Jeanneau and it worked o.k., requiring scraping first, then sanding clean. I gave some to a friend cleaning up an old early ''60''s Pearson daysailer somethingorother (converting it to a motor launch) and it bit the underlying glass layer a little too hard. He kept grinding and sanding. Try a test patch first. Otherwise, sandblasting bad; soda blasting good.....

 

[jharrison]

Any certain brand, I have heard some work and some don''t, so I would like to find the one that does.

 

[jharrison]

anyone tried interlux''s "interstrip 299E"?

 

[VIEXILE]

The Interlux is what we used. However, the Frenchie boat only had 3 coats of bottom paint on it since the LAST blister job. The old Pearson was loaded up, and, undoubtedly had a different (early ''60''s) blend of resins. Read the can before you buy. It seems to work less often than not.

 

[TSOJOURNER]

We stripped 17 years of bottom paint off of my old C&C last spring. We used Dolphinite for chemical stripping much of it. The boat had a lot of paint on it, no fiberglass showing so your experience may be different.

The gotchas are:
- It isn''t cheap. We went through 5 Gals ($250) on a 37'' boat and did not complete the job.
- You need good protective gear
- It is a really foul and messy process
- You really have to use a LOT of it.

We found that some areas came right down to the fiberglass with zero effort, whereas in some spots it didn''t. Seems the spots where we put it on REALLY REALLY thick are the ones where the paint scraped off with no work at all. It also seemed that if you didn''t put enough on the first time it was almost harder to get it off later.

Eventually we ran out of time on the stripping job and had to have the yard finish it, but we did save a fair amount of money on them stripping it for us.

Basic rule of thumb was that you never had enough on it; you had to put it on so thick that it dripped off onto you. Try to put something with the consistency of Grape Jelly on the bottom of an almost horizontal surface! The whole time we were wishing we could turn the boat upside down.

 

[slamson]

we have recently bought a 26'' 1962 new horizan sail boat.i was wondering if anybody had any tips on polishing up the fiberglass on the deck

 

[TSOJOURNER]

Try Peelaway #1 it has worked well for myself and number of friends.