Blacking Up

There comes a time in every boat's life where you have to accept the inevitable and admit it's time to redo the paint on the hull. This might not sound so bad until you realise that the paint is bitumen based. In case you haven't had the dubious pleasure of using bitumen based paint - it's pretty horrible stuff. It doesn't wash off your skin unless you scrub it with white spirit. It sticks in clumps in your hair if you're unfortunate enough to get any on your head.

Anyway, it was some time ago when John Gray was last blacked and its been in need of doing since we bought her so we decided it was time to bite the bullet.

The basic blacking technique goes:

1. Drive boat into dry dock. Or in our case VERY carefully drive boat into dry dock with listed status as we're suffering power issues - more on this another time - and can't stop very easily. Oh and did I mention the canopy that we just fit under? Well we had to avoid clattering that too.
2. Drain water out of dry dock. This part is easy. Someone else handles it whilst you keep an eye on the boat.
3. Get down and dirty with the pressure washer to remove all of the algae, freshwater mussels and crud that's accumulated over the years.
4. Get down and dirtier with scrapers to remove whatever the pressure washer couldn't.
5. Paint the hull.
6. Wait. Drink beer, go to sleep, have lunch...
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 until you have achieved the required number of coats. Or you have run out of beer.

I don't have any pictures of taking the boat into the dock as I had other things on my mind than what I'd put on the blog at the time, but here are some that you might find interesting...

"Matt, stop faffing with the camera and pass me the pressure washer!"

Pressure washing the hull

This is what scraping off 60' worth of paint will do to you

Matt and Mum making good progress

Sophie and Dad making more progress

Johnny welds on new anodes.

Our work here is done. Refilling the dry dock was oddly nerve wracking as you re-float the boat.

"Is it full yet?" There wasn't much clearance between the canopy and the roof (it got a lot closer than this but I was too preoccupied to take photos!)

Big thanks to everyone who came and helped, especially to Matt,  Mum, Dad, Amy, Loz, Helen, John, and Polly. You made the painting go much faster and the weekend go more smoothly!

And now some hopefully useful information for anyone else who stumbles across this blog in their search for information on blacking. The first time you have to do it you'll have a thousand differing opinions on what you should do but in the end it generally comes down to cost. Ideally every time you came out of the water you'd shot blast the hull back to bare metal and reapply your blacking. Plenty of people will advise you do this, but good luck finding somewhere that will be happy with you shot blasting that doesn't cost a fortune.

We decided to go with a branded bitumen based paint as they claim to have better resistance to pollutants in the water (e.g. deisel spills) which will break down normal bitumen paint. This also allowed us to apply over the top of the existing bitumen based paint without having to take absolutely everything to bare metal.

The paint we used was Rylard Rytex ordered from BoatPaint.co.uk, we ordered 25 litres to cover a 60' narrowboat with three coats. 20 litres might have just sufficed but we wanted to be sure we had some spare.

Big wallpaper strippers are very useful but if you're using the little ones then make sure you get stiff ones and not the flexible ones.

Obviously once you've done your research, bought your paint, brushes, scrapers, booked the dock, etc, etc. everyone will come out and tell you how you should use 2-pac instead, or get the whole thing shot blasted instead of using a pressure washer. Ignore these people. YOU have made a decision based on what YOU want to do with YOUR boat.

Good luck!