Different day, different color

First coat of 545 primer is on.

When I got to the boatyard I uncoved the boat and immediately started finding small flaws in the high build primer coat. I was toying with the idea of an additional high build coat since I have about a gallon of material still left. What I decided to do was walk around the boatyard and take a real close look at some other Awl-Grip paint jobs I had admired in the past. What I found is that from a foot or two away those really great paint jobs looked worse than what my boat looks like now -defect wise. That was a good exercise and I canceled any thoughts of an extra high build coat or additional filling and fairing.

This time, I chose not to do the entire deck cabintop and cockpit all at once. I may be a bit clumsy but I found trying to work myself along the cockpit well, decks and cabin top without bumping into wet paint to be quite challenging. With the final primer and hopefully just a little more sanding to do I chose to do the decks and cabin sole separate. That is going to slow down the whole operation in the short term but hopefully it will save me time by not having to fix as much later.

First impression. This stuff is thin. It goes on like water. Within a few seconds though it sets up. Seems like when the right thickness is reached it gets gummy immediately. The instructions call for rolling and tipping but I found the tipping part to be impractical. Once I rolled it out thin enough the stuff kicked off. Even when I tried working with very small 1 foot sections I wasn't quick enough to tip before it started setting up. I did keep a brush handy for when the primer started running which it did frequently when I was painting the cabin top. I only had a 9 inch roller with me and it was really too big for the edges and sides of the cabin top. I kept getting too much on and the primer kept on running. Tomorrow I will have my three inch roller.

Speaking of rollers, I started off by using a relatively clean roller handle I had on the workbench. Seems the solvents in the 545 primer are quite potent and the little bit of paint that was still on the handle started getting into my fresh primer coat. I had to stop and run to the store for a new one.

Finally, with primer as thin as this, when you put a freshly loaded roller on the underside of the counter and press a little too aggresively the primer flies off dramatically in all directions. I hosed myself down a few times until I learned to go very gently until I had worked a lot of the paint off of the roller. Luckily I was wearing safety glasses. I soaked one arm at one point. This stuff is very runny even before thinning. Within ten minutes though it was dry to the touch. Interesting stuff.

The one coat didn't cover everything. I didn't really expect it to. Another coat should about do it.





Now I have to wait 24 hours before a light sanding. The weather outlook is looking pretty good.