After many hours labour the hull as been wet & dry sanded and polished back to a smooth gloss with a few little patches showing on the side that the colour wasn't quite as thick as we once thought, but at least that means it will be light.

Since then we have finished off the cradle and put the boat back upright. The floor was then painted with white two pack paint with a roller. Three light coats were first applied wet on wet to get an even colour across the floor. To get the grippy finish a mixture of "Norglas" grip additive and caster sugar where added to the white paint. This slightly thickened mixture was then spread over the floor with a roller.

Since uni work was handed in last week its all hands on deck to get her rigged and fitted out so we can get her wet at least once before the Belmont state titles. Most of the fittings have arrived and will begin to be place on the boat mid week. A bolts order will be made early this week once we have the fittings and a new s/steel mast step is in the works to be welded up before the weekend.

Hull has been sprayed

Finally got a chance to spray the hull and decks this weekend. The colour is Waratah red and flowed from the 1.4mm nozzle gun very well with no reducer. We ended up using 2.5 liters of colour (as opposed to 1.5L that i calculated from the data sheet) the main reason for this is that we decided to do a third coat on the hull from chine to chine to try and smooth out a little bit of orange peel.

Next step is to use a roller the put the white paint on floor and put in the aggregate to make a grippy finish on the floor. Then the do the final trimming pieces such as clear two pack paint on the rudder gantry, rudder, centreboard and transom bar.

Primer on topside of hull.

quick update:

The hull has had a further two coats of primer and spot filler and looks pretty good if i don't say so myself. It took a lot of torture boarding and relentless sanding to get there, but i think the hull is as smooth and fair as we are going to get it. We changed over to an older spray gun we have that has a 2.0mm nozzle and we thinned the primer 15-20% with reducer and it went on a lot better than our first coat with a 1.4mm nozzle and only 10% thinner.

We had hoped to spray the hull with colour over the long weekend but the rainy weather (high humidity) has set us back. So instead we flipped the hull over and began fairing the decks and cockpit with Q-cells/ epoxy then spot filler and we gave it a coat of high build primer this afternoon.

At this stage it looks like the topside will take one more pass with some spot filler to fill a few pin holes in the side tanks and help fair in a few more joins etc. Then a final primer coat and we should be good to spray the topsides as well. Therefore potentially next weekend could be a big weekend of spraying and we might be able to get all the colour sprayed by Monday next week (weather depending).

We also reweighed the hull before adding the primer this arvo, it came in at 43.5kg, with bowsprite and rudder gantry in place. So it still looks like a may end up with some lead in the boat (touch wood!).

The new carbon rig is still a few weeks away, as are the fittings from ronstan so we have decided to skip the first round of the state titles in two weeks time. This is probably a good idea as well because uni work is starting build up for the end of October. Our next aim is to have the boat on the water by the end of October so we can get some practice in before the second round of the states in November.

Here are some images of the progress: