Final preparations before painting the cockpit

After our failure with painting gelcoat in the cockpit (read more about it HERE) we decided to paint the cockpit with two component paint instead. Since we had some work to get rid of the gelcoat we also took the time to fix the final plastic crack we had. This crack had occurred during winter due to leakages above, when the temperature dropped the water inside froze and caused the plastic to crack. The reason for the water getting inside the plastic was some leakages in one of the cowling vents, which we have fixed, and hopefully that was the only leakage.

First up was to grind around the plastic crack, and to let the wood inside dry.

Then it was time for fun work, or maybe not… It was adding putty and sanding time! One thing we learned is that in order to have even surfaces the process of adding putty and sanding must be done more times than you first think.

As mentioned above we also had to get rid of the gelcoat in the cockpit that hadn’t hardened properly. We got rid of most of it and also sanded the surfaces we could. When we were satisfied it was time for the first layer of paint, the primer.

It was really nice to see the even surfaces and this primer covered really good. It was thin so we had to constantly stop the paint from running, but overall it was easy to paint with. Way easier than the gelcoat!

For both the primer and paint we chose to use Epifanes polyurethane 2-component lack.

We have actually already added the first layer of white paint, but we need two or three more layers to make it cover properly. After that we will be able to show some awesome before and after pictures! 🙂