Got down to Maggie at 10h00 this morning, and after a bit of setting up time, had the scraper in my hand by 10h30....... I then scraped..... and scraped..... and scraped..... by 16h00, i'd had enough..... and had scraped about one third of one side...... this is one hell of a job.....
Maggie is not sporting a nice combination of white, red and green.... it appears that there is a green epoxy coat over the white gel, and then about 20 layers of antifoul over that..... I wouldn't ordinarily have bothered, but it is definitely starting to flake in places, and there is distinct evidence of 'craters' where it has previously been ignored and the antifoul done straight over the flaked bits... so the bottom is a bit rough..... especially as the antifoul is 5mm thick in places!!!!!!!!!
I'm hoping that all my hard work will result in a nice smooth finish, and hence be both aesthetically more pleasing as well as a bit quicker..... if nothing else, i'll have removed 40Kg of old antifoul!
Along the way, I scraped the rudder support, which had previously been of concern as this is where the surveyor had found soft expoxy... he had dug it out in one or two places and declared that under the soft epoxy was sound glass, so nothing to worry about, just not very tidy...... I scrapped a lot of this back, and discovered a 'sheath' of epoxy about 2 to 3mm thick... it had in some places not bonded well to the boat and hence was just asking for water to be trapped behind it, and in others hadn't set properly, hence the soft bits..... I haven't completely removed it, as I've got enough to do as it is.... but it did come off the bronze foot of the rudder support in one big chunk, so now there is a step in the surface to the rudder post of about 2mm..... I need to decide what to do with it all.... its only cosmetic, but boy will it be a big job to remove it all...... maybe its next seasons task... i'll just scrape the old antifoul off this season and remove the epoxy sheath next season..... maybe its there to stiffen the rudder support up a bit.... in which case, a few extra layers of glass might have made more sense.... or maybe it was just there to fair the thing up given her racing pedigree... who knows.... |
