How do you Eat an Elephant

I haven't posted in a while, but I've been juggling a number of projects that are in various stages of completion and I prefer to report on the job once it's completed. With that said, I did officially finish a job that has been on going for months in little chunks because it is so terrible that I can only handle about an hour of it at a time. The elephant I'm talking about was the removal of many, many years of bottom paint so that I have a bare hull. I'm certain that the bottom has been stripped bare in the past because I found an epoxy barrier coat underneath the layers of anti fouling paint (I doubt they came that way from the factory), but I'd guess it's been at least 20 years and the amount of paint on the bottom was just staggering. 

When I began last fall, I already had 2 gallons of chemical paint stripper on hand from other projects (different manufacturers) so I thought I would start with the rudder and see which one worked the best. I quickly found out that these strippers work on 1-3 coats pretty well, but not so much when you have 15-20 coats. Both strippers basically made a big mess and still left me with most of the paint on the boat. The next method I tried was a sander with 40 grit paper. I already knew that this would be a disaster as well, but I'm not too bright and don't learn from past mistakes (Alberg 35). Even with a big dust collector attached and a full face respirator, it made a big red cloud of toxic dust that would have taken years off my life and polluted the property where I store the boat.

I spent hours googling in hopes of finding an easy solution and aside from hiring someone to do the job for me, I found that most ultimately resort to a scraper and hours and hours of backbreaking work.  I tried a few different types:

• Carbide Furniture Scraper - works for a few coats but was not up to the task I had. Also, it was awkward to use while crouching underneath the boat.
• Standard  Paint Scraper - the blade was too flexible and couldn't really dig through and under all the layers.
• 2" Mortising Chisel - too sharp on the corners and tended to gouge badly.  It did get all the layers of paint though.

I spent some quality time at Lowes and found that the Warner Pro 1-1/4" putty knife was just about right. It was somewhat sharpened and had a thick blade that didn't bend when trying to get through the paint, but the edges were rounded enough so it didn't gouge the underlying fiberglass.  

So with the method and tool chosen I got to work, sort of.  There is no way around the fact that this job is back breaking work and requires all of your shoulder, abdomen, arm, and back muscles for it to work effectively.  You are not just gently scraping along, you are forcefully jamming the blade under paint and popping it off in 1/4" chips.  I kept an 8x10' tarp underneath the area I was working on to capture the chips.  

First session's progress

Circling back to the title of the post: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.  This became my mantra.  The first few days I could only do about 30 minutes at a time before my muscles were spent, but by the end both my technique and muscles had improved so I could last about an hour at a time.  I generally would use my lunch hour doing about 50 minutes of work and 10 minutes of cleanup each session.  It was slow, miserable work but after 22 hour long sessions (bites) I had completed the majority of the work.  

Today I finally finished off the entire bottom and I am sooo glad it's done.  Well, sort of...  I applied some fairing compound along the keel seam and will have to sand that down along with a light sand over the rest of the hull, but in comparison, it's not so bad.  Once that's done, I'll apply a few more barrier coats before bottom paint next spring/early summer when I launch.  

It may not look pretty, but that's as bare a bottom as I can get.