Sanding and Painting

wingssail images-judy jensen/fredrick roswold
Power Sanding

We decided to stop postponing it and get into the painting project. The walls inside Wings'cabin have turned kind of yellow instead of the bright white they once were, and we've never been happy with the sloppy job done on Sidney in 2001 anyhow. No time like the present to fix it.

Starting with some power sanding to smooth out the epoxy filler, then a lot of wet sanding with a hand block to get the wall smooth.

Wet sanding

Using wet and dry sandpaper on a rubber block, we first dip the block into a bucket of water then, with water dripping everywhere, start rubbing on the wall. Amazingly, it works well and other than being really wet it is less of a mess than power sanding, it doesn't leave dust every where and there less clean up. We had towels along the base of the wall to soak up the water which ran down.

Painting Wood Primer
Finally Judy puts some primer on the piece of new wood that goes under the cockpit window.

This finishes the prep for one wall but we have several more. next week Judy will hire Hasan and his nephews, from the Muslim village of Ban Koh En nearby, to sand the rest of the walls.

Working in the Galley

We're back. The walls have been sanded by Hasan and his nephews, now we have to prep for painting.

Sweaty Work

Masking.

Fred Painting

Finally we start to paint. The painting goes pretty fast and in three days we have it done. So the whole job took 11 days and quite a few hours of labor, and in the end probably nobody but us will notice that we even did it, but we will, and it looks good to us, this is what matters.

Cover gets sewed

One last job to do: we have to sew up the aft cover which got shredded in one big afternoon squall a few days before.