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| Here’s the before… 1/4″ of so many years of paint |
Welcome to our Project in Pictures! Here’s photo log of the copper bottom application.
Yes. That means I’m being lazy on the blog today. But it’s a cool way to post a project. Am I right?
We chose to use CopperCoat, and are really happy with the results. It’s been 6 weeks since we put Luna Sea back in the water and the bottom is still clean! Normally, our local waters start to foul the hull (ie stuff starts growing on it) in less than a week and require a monthly cleaning of the bottom. Mark was just in the water (brrrr!) to swap out the zinc and the bottom was silky smooth. We will continue to post updates over time, just in case anybody reading is considering using a similar product.
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| We started out by hand scraping the worst parts |
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| Note the keel damage in center/bottom of this pic |
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| The rudder took FOREVER. Someone was giddy when it was done. |
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| The rest of the paint was removed by sand blasting. Notice we are properly fendered in case any wayward boats try to run into us in the yard. |
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| Making progress |
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| Iron keel damage was ground out and repaired, then painted with barrier coat. |
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| Sanding down the areas where the supports were during the main paint job |
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| Close up of mixing a small batch of the epoxy and copper dust. |
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| Gotta get it all mixed! |
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| Rudder and prop – ready to go! |
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| Burnished bottom – including the new thru hulls. A critical step in the process. |
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| Rolling on those last support patches. |
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| Oops. Needed to replace a couple thru hulls – had to repaint those… |
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| Done and headed to the water! |
We are not going to bother with trying to make this an instructional blog post. CopperCoat comes with fantastic instructions – and even better customer service. And we called a million times just to be sure we did everything correctly (the answers were later found in the instructions… Guess who was in charge of reading the instructions) The process is pretty easy, and if it holds up over time as well as it’s doing initially – it will absolutely be worth the slight increase in cost.
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Very glad to see this post! We are doing a bottom job on Galapagos next summer and I've been thinking hard about Copper Coat. This summer, even in our cold water, the increase in temp was enough to cause massive soft growth on her bottom. I'd love to put something on her that would last.
The thing I like most about Copper Coat is that it is NON ABLATIVE! Cleaning my own bottom (that sounds weird) I am appauled at the massive clouds of paint that slough off from simple wiping. multiplied by millions of boats in the ocean and that is an ecological disaster with all the toxic stuff and heavy metals, Yes Copper is a heavy metal, but it should last 5-10 times that of a ablative and drastically reduce the amount entering the water. As for performance, If the first six weeks are any indication, I will rarely have to clean her.