• Before and after painting the cockpit

    Finally all our preparations before painting the cockpit was done and we could paint it white. We used Epifanes polyurethane two-component lack, which was pretty easy to paint with. But it didn’t cover very good so on some places we needed four layers. We used foam rollers, which worked pretty well. They swallowed a lot of paint but the result was good. Since it is a two-component paint we also needed to change the foam rollers after some time since the paint dissolved the roller. But now let’s look at some pictures of how it looked before and after painting. The real before and after pictures of the cockpit will…

  • 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…

  • Companionway door renovation – part one

    One thing we want to have completed before the summer starts for real is the companionway door we have had for our sailboat. The old one we have is just a plywood with some insulation on it. It is leaking and is looking pretty boring, and with the newly renovated sliding hatch we need a matching companionway door. The door is pretty thick and will feel as a proper door when finished. Next up with the companionway door will be to add the metal frame, continue sanding, add windows and finally varnish it! 🙂 As mentioned before we have started to paint the cockpit, hopefully the weather is with us…

  • Our mistake of painting with gelcoat

    After many days of preparing the cockpit for painting by adding putty and sanding, we were finally satisfied with the surfaces. We cleaned the cockpit thoroughly with both water and acetone and added masking tape. Our plan was to paint with gelcoat first and then add another layer of topcoat above. The reason for this is because if it doesn’t cover properly the topcoat most be sanded first before the second layer can be applied. If only gelcoat were to be used it would harden properly and will remain a little bit sticky. We had discussed earlier if we should use a two component paint instead but since we had…

  • Renovation of leaking sliding hatch

    We have had trouble earlier with our leaking sliding hatch , which we started to repair a couple of weeks ago, read more about part one HERE. When the linseed oil we added had hardened 14 days later we started to varnish it. After we had added 8 layers of varnish we glued the Isiteek, which is fake teak made out of plastic, back on the hatch and then it was time to start with repairing the leakages. In parallel to working with the leaking sliding hatch we have also started working with the door to the cabin. We currently have a provisional one but the previous owner had started…