Removing Yacht Paint - Tools & Method

In the absence of anything to report in respect of actual progress this week, I thought that I would spend a little time looking at the various stripping methods that we have employed and how they worked.

First, lets talk about the topsides of the yacht.

Nitromos

The lazy mans approach and pretty useless. Touched the top coat of paint but that was about it. Messy and horrible to use, I can't say that I would recommend it. It's OK for varnish in my experience but lousy in this application.

Heat Gun & Scraper

Heat gun was definitely the way to go. The key seem to be the type of scraper to use. Overall the winner for met at least had to be the two handed type of scraper. I found that by heating patches approximately 10cm in length along the planks, I could make fairly quick progress. I would estimate around two days overall to do a fair job of removing topside paints.

Not so easy the anti fouling. Bren and I took different approaches and I favour Brenden's way. His approach appeared to basically centre around using a hammer and chisel and steadily chipping away by cutting into the anti foul approximately 1cm or so behind the edge line. Mixed with a few other hammer and chisel methods, he seemed to get marginally faster results.

I took the awful method which was to use a heat gun and one of the single handed flexible scrapers. The smell of burning anti foul is dreadful and it really needs a very good mask to do it. I found the method fairly slow.

Whilst Bren's method gets it off fairly fast, it doesn't leave the overall finish quite as good as the heat gun method although, a bit of time with the sander will quickly even things out.

Tried both a fairly powerful belt and mini-mouse/detail type sander. Unless you are very skilled with the belt sander as a tool I would say it is perhaps a bit vicious. The mini mouse is certainly less productive but does produce a reliable and decent quality of finish.