Welding, Grinding & Painting – life with a steel boat.

I seem to have spent the last two weeks continuously covered in paint chips, paint dust, rust, epoxy dust, and paint. Such is life for a week or so once a year when you own a steel boat and put her on the hard for the annual maintenance; or in my case for a month or so while a few years of lost ground is recovered.

After quite a lot of work grinding out scratches and other paint defects, wire brushing, acid etching, washing, etching, washing, brushing, etc. and priming them and then wire brushing the whole of the underwater hull it was eventually time to put on a coat of vinyl chloride paint that will act as the new base for the anti-fouling paint.

There are still a few patches to touch up though as today my friend Carl Freeman, an expert welder, came to weld up the old speed transducer hole that is no longer required. While we had the welder out we also moved a few anode attachment points by grinding off the old studs and welding new ones on. The larger anodes are bolted between two studs and some of the old studs were set at spacing that don’t fit standard anodes, or rather anodes that I can get here. Obviously the paint got a bit singed around the welding so a little more preparation is required before the final coat.

Here are a few photos of Carl wielding the welder.

Welding the inside bead

Welding the outside bead

The finished patch ready of preparation and paint.