In the five weeks since the last post I have been diligently sanding and painting. Along the way there have been some difficulties, some progress and some satisfaction.
As one job list gets completed the next list grows and there are jobs that I am doing that never got on the job list but were front of my mind anyway.
At the end of the last post we had started the stainless steel work. That is now complete. All the holes for the fixing have been drilled, epoxied and re drilled. The holes for the navigation lights have been drilled and the stainless stored until the interior and exterior painting is completed.
If we stick to the fittings these have now progressed beyond the winch bases and chainplates. As stated above all the stainless steel work is drilled as is the stanchons, jack line padeyes, jammers, deck organisers, running gear padeyes, genoa tracks, mooring cleats and fairleads.
Instead of handrails on the cabin top I have installed a grab line the same as on Passion X. This doubles as a jack line to which the short tether can be attached and ensures that you cannot be lost overboard. To go forward of the mast you need the deck mounted jack line and that is also installed, or at least the holes are drilled for the fittings.
On the cabin top I have installed the padeyes for the mainsheet bridle. I have stuck with the Wichard folding padeyes as on Passion X but gone up a size so that it is secured by three 10 mm bolts through 36 mm of cabin top and doublers. They have a working load of four tonnes and a break load of nine tonnes. I have used the same strength for the staysail fixing to the foredeck. Here the 10 mm bolts go through 50 mm of hardwood blocks fastened to a 21 mm thick plywood frame which forms the back of the anchor locker.
With all the fittings I found a few places where additional doublers were needed. Mostly around the stern stainless steel work, the genoa turning blocks and the deck top jacklines. They are all finished now except for a coat of paint on the genoa turning block doublers.
I do have the top coat on the deck. The epoxy undercoat and the first coat of two pack polyurethane went very well. The first coat of polyurethane was 50:50 undercoat and topcoat which gave a good shine and a bit of body. Unfortunately the spray gun failed at the start of the final top coat and during the delay trying to fix it the weather changed for the worse. I had to finish with a smaller than ideal nozzle which made the job take a lot longer than planned.
There is only a short time window to recoat the polyurethane without sanding it all back so I perservered despite the wind. Most of the deck will be recoated with non skid and the only areas where the gloss is important is the cockpit seats and the cabin side. These are passable but it would have been nice to do it all in controlled factory enviromnent.
The interior painting is progressing with many days of sanding, masking up and painting. The gloss has to be sanded of all the old epoxy and each coat has to be sanded down. Any construction glue excess has to be sanded off as this will the the last chance to do any tidying up. In general all the interior surfaces have two coats of high build epoxy primer undercoat, a coat of polyurethane undercoat and a coat of polyurethane topcoat. On the carlins I did an extra coat of undercoat to fill the wood grain more completely and the result is passable. If I was building a show boat I would do two epoxy primer undercoats, two polyurethane undercoats and two topcoats. Ideally the undercoat would have a higher gloss so that the imperfections can be attended to before the topcoats as these are thin and do little filling. In the old days when we were varnishing our moulded scow moths we needed at least seven coats to fill the grain to our satisfaction. Passion XI is however a bit bigger than the scow moth and I don’t have my my father to help.
I have given in to my most cautious self and added two layers of heavy unidirectional glass across the strongback under the quarter berth. That is topped with biaxial and covered with peel ply. I was suprised how little resin was required to thoroughly saturate the cloth and how clean the finish was under the fine textured peel ply.
