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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…
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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…
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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…
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Continuing with the plastic repairs
On Saturday the sun was shining and we were finally able to continue with the plastic repairs. As mentioned earlier, we had removed the window we had in the cockpit since it was leaking a lot (read more about it HERE). Now it was time to seal and reinforce this area with fiberglass and polyester. We started with the plastic repair late summer last year, if you want to read more about our previous plastic work, check the tag Plastic repair. We have chosen to use polyester for the plastic repairs in the cockpit, the reasons why we choose polyester over epoxy are: The price, polyester is cheaper than epoxy…
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Removing leaking window in cockpit
We recently fixed a leaking porthole we had in the cockpit, but that was not the only leakage we had in the cockpit. There is a also a window on the deck in the cockpit which has been leaking a lot. It is just a plexiglass sealed with marine sealing. Since most sealing materials doesn’t stick pretty well on plexiglass we will remove this window completely. For a while we had an idea of having a proper deck hatch, but they are expensive and our cockpit is pretty small so the hatch might make it feel smaller. We also have an idea of having a table in the cockpit and…