Winter Progress

Zach,

Damn, missed you by a day, I wish I would have seen the vinyl in person! His bruder showed me pics of the orange stripes. I picked up my sea ray cockpit from Enos on Saturday. 2nd trip down from buffalo, he's the best.

Enjoy, Noel

Zac,
Looks great I have my interior out and at upholsters for a fresh install after 31 years. Can't wait to see the finished product. May re paint engine next year, I don't have courage to pull it out just for paint. Yours clean engine and others on site sure make me envious though.

Got a little more done this Sunday. I stripped all that pretty new vinyl out and got it all bagged up and protected in plastic wrap on the other side of the barn. I pulled all the deck hardware (besides lift rings) and started sanding on the dash.

The dash honestly didn't look too bad compared to others I've seen so I started with 800 and moved to 1000 and a 3m product to remove 1000-1200 scratches and finesse it 3m (stuffs spensive!).

I quickly found that the 800 required a lot of elbow grease to remove the oxidization. I think I am going to go back over it all with 400-800-1000 then buff aggressive and final polish.

Goal for this Sunday is to completely finish the dash wetsand/buff, aggressively buff the whole deck, then finish buff, and re install the windshield and deck hardware.

thankfully the deck is in amazing shape and just needs buffed rather than wet sanded. Also, I was able to remove the cup holders and more importantly the glove box hole without damage. I lined the inside of the boat completely with plastic wrap to protect the carpet from water and buffing compound.

After this is finished I need to repair the fronts of the exhaust wells where they always crack and a few spots on the main bulkhead and put the super clean on the bilge area before the motor goes home again.

Got the PCM engine decals reproduced and they look wonderful on that silver paint. I decided to live with the dirt in the valve covers for a year and make that a next winter project.

Anyone have tips on rub rail protecting while buffing? This rub rail looks darn near new and I though about just taping it off with a mild masking tape and being careful not to burn the tape to the rub rail.

Yeah I used to do that on the 86 but this one looks wonderful as is and has virtually no visable damage. Rope will be replaced though.

It needs a little gel/glass work on the exterior hull but my goal for spring is to get it 100% finished from the rubrail in that way it's a usable boat when it needs to be.

My goal is by summers end to be 100% done with the boat other than the trailer resto which will probably happen in the summer of 16 while the boat is on my lift.

Only thing left I think I need for the boat will be the repro dash panel but that will have to wait untill 500 bucks says so.

Kewl Timmy. I am just going to have to live with the fact I wont be able to buff the little flat area between the rub rail and the first deck line that well unless I remove the rub rail.

phatsat67 wrote: Kewl Timmy. I am just going to have to live with the fact I wont be able to buff the little flat area between the rub rail and the first deck line that well unless I remove the rub rail.

Hey Z-
If you're going to take the rope out anyway, why not just take the rail off one side at a time and finish the job the way you really want to. Shouldn't take that long, probably shorter in time than masking the whole thing !!

Moj'

Not a ton to report, my progress seems small today with the loss of a fellow CCF member.

I got the dash wet sanded in 400/800/1000 grid then polished up with 3m super duty compound and finished with finesse it. There are some battle scars on the deck but I didn't want to sand the cream brown. I want to get some more time out of it before I start taking gel off the original surface.

Finished the entire deck with 3m super duty and finesse it. It looks great and I am sure it will look much better out in natural light vs florescent.

Next Sunday the deck/dash will get a polish coat of sealer wax and all the hardware/windshield will go back on. After that I will start to cut away and grind gel back to repair the few places that need attention in the bilge. Hope to have the bilge project well under way and on the up swing by the end of the day Sunday this weekend.

Ok, so I finally got myself back in gear and did some glass repair in the bilge of the brown rig. The bulkheads at the front of the exhaust wells were cracked/on their way out and some of the glass was falling off of the poorly laminated main bulkhead.

I removed all the old bulkhead wood with revealed slightly moist but solid main/secondary stringers in those areas. I cut new wood replacements and bedded/glassed them into place. It was hard to get good lamination at the top/floor height so I filled what didnt laminate well with thickened resin after that had all cured. Painted those with some bilgekote white enamel.. I sealed up the main bulkhead with thickened resin per Timmy B's instruction. Been a while since I've laid glass but it turned out ok.

Monday I painted all the remaining parts. Last night I assembled everything mostly enough to get it laid into the boat and did that. Finished up at about 11pm.

Plan is to finish everything else and run it on the hose Thursday night then possible drive it Friday evening or Saturday afternoon.

It still needs exterior gel work/buffing/graphics but I wanted to make it a usable rig before I started on that because I can still ski if it doesn't have graphics on it ha..

phatsat67 wrote: Annnnnndddd thank you windows 8 for sideways photos.

Looks great Zach but I'm friggin dizzy now!

Windows8, My Ipad will do that once in a while too though.

Looking good Zach! Almost ready for the water. What brand of silver paint did you use ?

phatsat67 wrote: Must be good quality. It was about 200 bucks a quart.

you shouldn't store that paint on it's side like that.

Easy fix!


Nice work Zach! Looking good.

phatsat67 wrote: Must be good quality. It was about 200 bucks a quart.

Yeap- That Chroma-Premier paint is top of the line. It was 1st used on Jeff Gordon's RaceCar. When I was at CarQuest- we had a Body Shop that used this paint. When he had a Pearl color we'd mix 4 ounces of each. He'd do spray outs until he matched the color- even though we had the color code and the $6.000 SpectraMaster Color Camera- it still would be alittle off. Once he hit the color we'd mix up qts, even a gallon at times- Just for the one car the paint bill would be $600...
Computing the price was only because of all the colors you had to mix in there. So they had to make up the money for that qt of mixing color that was usually around $100 a qt.

Gary S wrote: Here's a tip for you and anyone else with left over paint. I didn't worry about it in the past but with paint costing so much now that a product called Bloxygen really works. Here is the link I used to buy it at Woodcrafters but now they moved farther away so I just get it on line. I use it in my gel coat too.

Thanks for that link Gary. Have you had any issue using gel past the 3 month recommended shelf life using this stuff? I was a little optimistic on my 67 project and tried to save on shipping so I already have my gel. I think I'll buy a can on this stuff and spray it in the 5 gallon pale.

phatsat67 wrote: For those wondering why I sent a pic of the Morse, I sand blasted it and ground off some of the sl*g from casting that was on it. Painted it with some double cover rustolum semi gloss black and that gave it the perfect look. The capacity tag was originally just screwed over foam and it was all bent and terrible looking. When he did the interior I had him add a piece of wood the same thickness as the foam behind it and screw the tag to that. It made the tag look nice and flat instead of all bent up.

Here I thought you were just showing how well you can polish a knob