Dinghy progress
Feb. 15th, 2026 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnI've stripped off a lot of the peeling paint. Now the boat looks like this:
I had originally thought I might keep some of the paint, but it is so cracked in so many places, and comes off so easily under the heat gun, that I decided I might as well take off all of it and start over with something tougher. My dolly made from the roofrack with added wheels works really well - I can easily move the boat about with the slightest nudge.
I made a foolish mistake while doing this. I'd propped up the trailer against a wall to get it out of the way, held up by the oars. I looked at it and thought: if I should, like a fool, clumsily nudge the oars, the front of the trolley might come down on the boat! This would be most unfortunate!
So I moved the oars so I could move the trolley to a safer spot, and while I was doing that... the front of the trolley did indeed come down WHACK! right onto the hull.
Pants.
Oh well, if that's all the damage a fairly heavy metal pointy bit coming down hard on the wood can do, at least that gives me confidence the wood is pretty sound. I shall have to fill the hole, but it could have been worse.
I am trying not to to overcomplicate things by doing too much, but I did find that the glass tape had more or less come off the wood in one section along the keelband.
So I took out some of the keelband screws, removed the loose bit of glass tape, and discovered some odd powdery stuff underneath the keelband but on top of the glass tape. It looks almost like old plaster! Possibly some kind of filler that has got old and died? Or maybe the remnants of paint primer.
I think the darker stuff around the glass tape is probably old epoxy from the last time it was retaped. It's gone a bit manky at the edges, where the paint cracked - epoxy doesn't cope well with sunlight, I read - but it's pretty tough in the middle, so I've scraped off the 'plaster' and cut the epoxy back to a solid edge. I've bought some new glass tape and a mini marine epoxy kit.
Just found these helpful posts about minor repairs to keep an old Mirror ready to sail and using epoxy on a small area which will be useful when I've finished stripping and got to the epoxy stage.
I had originally thought I might keep some of the paint, but it is so cracked in so many places, and comes off so easily under the heat gun, that I decided I might as well take off all of it and start over with something tougher. My dolly made from the roofrack with added wheels works really well - I can easily move the boat about with the slightest nudge.
I made a foolish mistake while doing this. I'd propped up the trailer against a wall to get it out of the way, held up by the oars. I looked at it and thought: if I should, like a fool, clumsily nudge the oars, the front of the trolley might come down on the boat! This would be most unfortunate!
So I moved the oars so I could move the trolley to a safer spot, and while I was doing that... the front of the trolley did indeed come down WHACK! right onto the hull.
Pants.
Oh well, if that's all the damage a fairly heavy metal pointy bit coming down hard on the wood can do, at least that gives me confidence the wood is pretty sound. I shall have to fill the hole, but it could have been worse.
I am trying not to to overcomplicate things by doing too much, but I did find that the glass tape had more or less come off the wood in one section along the keelband.
So I took out some of the keelband screws, removed the loose bit of glass tape, and discovered some odd powdery stuff underneath the keelband but on top of the glass tape. It looks almost like old plaster! Possibly some kind of filler that has got old and died? Or maybe the remnants of paint primer.
I think the darker stuff around the glass tape is probably old epoxy from the last time it was retaped. It's gone a bit manky at the edges, where the paint cracked - epoxy doesn't cope well with sunlight, I read - but it's pretty tough in the middle, so I've scraped off the 'plaster' and cut the epoxy back to a solid edge. I've bought some new glass tape and a mini marine epoxy kit.
Just found these helpful posts about minor repairs to keep an old Mirror ready to sail and using epoxy on a small area which will be useful when I've finished stripping and got to the epoxy stage.
