Yard Work

29 October 2020 – YARD WORK – Alanya Turkey

There has been lots of work done on our boat in the last two months, since my last blog entry. First, we hauled out of the water on 8 September. The boat yard at Alanya Marina operates a 100T travel lift, and its a tall one – which means that I didn’t have to remove any rigging or wind generators. The crew were gentle with our boat and did a great job with the pressure washer.

Then, they moved us over to a “remote” area of the yard, one where we could make a mess and a lot of dirt.

We received two fixed price quotes for “sandblasting” the hull, selected one, and then basically waited for 5 weeks for the blaster to show up. The price was good, much cheaper than in NZ. In that 5 week period, I worked on finishing the deck painting. This was the paint programme:

1. Remove all the 21 year old Treadmaster, and grind off the remaining epoxy.
2. Roll on Jotun Jotamastic epoxy, one coat of grey, one coat of red, and another coat of grey.
3. Roll on Jotun XPrimer epoxy, one coat of white.
4. Roll on Jotun XTreme Gloss polyurethane, two coats of Lynx White 5097
5. Roll on Jotun XTreme Gloss polyurethane, one coat of Delphius Grey 0967
   Liberal sprinkling of Jotafloor aggregate non-skid additive, Medium grit (0.4 – 0.8mm)
6. Vacuum the un-bonded grit off, and then roll on two more coats of Grey.

This was a total of 9 coats of paint, some over bare metal, but most over several previous layers of paint. Hopefully, this will look good for many years to come.

I divided the deck area into 3 roughly equal sections: the raised cabin, the foredeck and the poop deck. This is what the raised cabin looked like after the first coat of grey polyurethane and the non-skid additive.

The poop deck was the next section to be finished. This photo shows the section after the red epoxy coat.

This photo shows the poop deck as I was applying the non-skid grit over the first layer of grey polyurethane.

This is the finished poop deck, we just have to remove the tape.

This is the foredeck, midway in the process. I had to apply lots of West System epoxy “fairing compound” (micro-balloons mixture) in order to smooth out the deck, all the deck.

The deck repainting project is now finished. We have yet to do the toe rail (the outside edge), but it will happen “in a few weeks”. The deck is noticeably cooler to walk on than the Treadmaster was, and the new non-skid is tenacious (like 80 grit sandpaper) but not too hard on the skin. Here is a photo of the foredeck and raised cabin, with the dorade boxes refinished (by Diane) and re-installed.

While waiting for the sandblaster to show up, I had a very close inspection of the hull. Although the bottom was last sandblasted and painted a mere 4 years ago in NZ (it should last more like 20 years), it was really a shitty job and had to be redone. Why was it shitty? Because they did not spray enough epoxy paint (should have been at least 600 mils, equal to 6 rolled coats) and they “wet blasted”. This means that the epoxy was sprayed over “rust bloomed” wet steel. After 4 years in salt water, this is an example of the result.

This was a piece of paint that just flicked off with my fingernail, just above the rudder. I blame the yard in NZ for this sub-standard job. I figure its not worth while mentioning their name, or trying to get compensation from them – the Manager was incompetent, a lier and a crook. Unfortunately, we were not present for 90% of the work done (our bad) so most of it was covered up by the time we saw the boat. This time, in Turkey, we had DRY “sand-blasting” with basalt grit and we were on site, full-time.

Another reason for the bottom job, is that we had evidence of some galvanic corrosion leaving some “pit holes”. Although none punctured the hull, they were concerning to me. Since there were no actual “holes”, I determined that the best course of action was to fill the “pits” with a special epoxy compound – Belzona 1311 (Ceramic R-Metal) (made in the UK and approved by Lloyds for metal replacement, machinery and hulls used in sea water immersion). It was fairly pricey stuff, at 370 euros for a 2kg kit, but it was perfect for the job, and easy to apply immediately after grit blasting, before spraying on epoxy.

This is a photo of one of the worst areas, clearing showing a very small corrosion pit.

I have since traced the reason for these pits to the connection to my Victron isolation transformer. Of course, all the hull zincs were completely eaten away, and this was really not possible to detect or correct while we were in India. The marina water was really foul. The situation will be rectified before we launch.

The “sandblaster” equipment was laid out next to our boat, showing his bags of “basalt” grit. It was really clean, dustless in fact, until he started to recycle the grit that fell on the concrete bottom — then it got dusty!

Inside the tented area, it wasn’t dusty at all, on the “first round”.

I figure the grit blasting took 16-18 hours in total. They did have some technical difficulties, and had to stop to refill the hopper, but it took nearly two full days.

This photo was taken at about 2100, after the first full day of blasting. I asked them to get paint on, immediately, but they insisted that it wouldn’t make any difference – they could paint the next day…

The next morning, I had a close look and found a few sections that looked like this. It forced them to re-blast in some areas.

After reblasting those areas, then they got paint on the one side.

After the blasting was completed, the painter sprayed on 4 coats of Jotun Universal epoxy primer, to a dry film thickness of approximately 100 microns. I figure that I need 600 microns of dry paint before rolling on the anti-fouling – Coppercoat. Over the next week, Diane and I will continue to paint the bottom and I’ll report on that with the next update.

Another job I did was to re-install our rejuvenated 200A alternator. I had removed it several months ago, and had the yard replace the bearing, clean and paint it. The adjuster arm also needed to be beefed up, and painted.