Almost there..........

I spent Thursday and Friday coming to the end of what's been five weeks of near non-stop hard graft to get the hull in primer, I'm not quite there yet hence the title but I'm on the last straight. I now know you can barrier coat a Centaur on your own to the required film thickness in a little under nine hours but you will need that third shredded wheat and decent air temperatures.

It was with a sense of excitement i could finally rub out "fill and fair hull" on the wipe-clean board seeing as its been there nearly two years and was a touch emotional when the last coat went on thinking i wouldn't have to do this again. Aching from head to toe and half blind in my right eye (from a direct hit of epoxy) i stood back thinking it actually looks bloody good, a feeling amplified when placing the moisture meter on the hull and it barely registering on the scale. Although I don't think for one minute I've cracked it, it feels great not hearing the alarm blaring on the Tramex.

cheers 

No re-design

Well not yet anyway. I managed to put the blog back together thanks to a designer who made an evolution of the original template my blog was based on - turns out blogger.com discontinued it a while ago.

What you're looking at now is the third and final incarnation as the previous post was written this morning just after i fucked up and the blog was rather basic looking. I found another template that looked a bit better then found this current template after one final trawl this evening - its a bit wider but is as close to the original and all because i didn't have the site backed up, 'kin idiot rog.

Do not adjust your set

The blog looks different - basically i went to alter a couple of items via the 'layout' button and when i hit 'update' i got a very different looking site. After wasting an afternoon online the nearest i got to the original layout resembled something like the lo-res brochure site.
I recovered most of the code from google cache plugged it all into blogger's html editor to no avail (all it did was throw up a load of errors) not being a coder  i've left it, maybe its time for a re-design.

cheers rog

One hull of a day

Nothing to say other than more sanding and filling these last two weeks and i'm almost there. I've given the hull two coats of shiny black wests so; a) i can see whats left to fill, b) it'll absorb heat quicker so will set rock hard, c) i need to seal the filler which  is porous and d) it looks pretty cool.

So on with the barrier coat next but first i need to buy some more epoxy, curiously i have loads of hardener both fast and slow but no resin and i don't want to start only to run out half way through.

Fill, sand then repeat..............

Hi sports fans the last few weeks have gone by in a cloud of sanded epoxy, at the time of typing i have only the bit of hull between the keels and a couple of bits along the waterline to do then its barrier coat and prime.

There really is no substitute for hard work (without blowing me own trumpet) as  i tried sulking my way through the first week as well as sanding; who says blokes can't multi-task?  After this came quiet resignation to the task at hand whilst admittedly still cursing as to why i ever had the boat peeled. 

This truly has been a lesson hard learned and one that'll take many years and beers to forget, only once did i break from all the noise and dust to visit coppercoat to get the requisite coppery shiny stuff to put on the  keels. After a frothy coffee and a bloody good laugh with Ewan and Jason i came away with everything i needed to apply what will be its only coat of antifouling for a good ten years.

Then it was back to the lair for another week knocking up epoxy then sanding it off with the  industrial vac. All in all it wasn't as bad as i'd imagined although the keels definately look different but it can't be helped if i want to keep them looking as ace as they do now.

Roger