t/t mango

It was time for a new project.  After weeks of scouring the Internet, Yasha found our 18' Eastern Boat in Fort Meyers Florida.  It was all factory no frills no dry storage with 25 year old smelly 2 stroke motor.  The hull was its original factory forest green gelcoat and the interior was (still is but not for long) battleship gray.  For selling purposes, the previous owner had a fresh coat of polyglow wax on the hull and had a new afganastan tan cushions made for the cooler helm seat and the bow seats and a new Bimini in the same shade of flat light light brown.  And the trailer was steel and scary with rust chunks falling in a gentle breeze.  The hull shape is beautiful.  WE HAVE A NEW PROJECT!  First, we stripped the polyglow wax off with a polyglow stripper and it sloughed off in a thin drippy slime.  In 30 minutes, the shiny forest green was dulled down to a flat swampy green.  Next, we sold the motor for cheap in less then 12 hours.  The same man that bought the motor also was gifted the new Bimini and the cushions.  We sold the cooler seat on www.offerup.com in 3 hours.  Now we had a blank page.  We brought her to a boat yard, put her on stands and gave away her trailer to one of our long time friends that works at the boat yard that we have used for the last 5-6 years.  I sanded the hull and the crappy anti fouling bottom paint job (it was put on previously without sanding or primer!).  While I was reigniting my tennis elbow Yasha was designing and building the aft storage compartment.  We wanted dry storage big enough for 4 kite surging kites and wide enough to do yoga on the topside.  He used gray fiberglass board and built the bulkhead, the large hatch and the gutter system for the hatch.  There were also two small pvc tubes that allow a passthrough drains getting water from the cockpit of the boat out the stern without dampening our large dry storage area.  There was a deposit put on a Yamaha 70 hp outboard, the largest engine rated for the boat.  I found a used aluminum trailer for $500 dollars nearby that would work with another $300 invested in it.  We tried to buy a new trailer, but the trailer companies claimed to be sold out for 2-3 weeks!  All is well, the used trailer saved us probably $1000, maybe more.  The previous fuel tank had issues so the previous had went over to an external tank.  Yasha sawzalled the floor and pulled out the tank.  It had about 4 gallons of bag smelling gas in it.  We brought the old fuel to the local dump, where the recycled the fuel for us.  Of course, it was a weird shaped they dont make that kind anymore tank so we got something somewhat comparable, but Yasha new that it was going to be more work getting the new tank to set up right in the floor.  We found an aluminum leaning post on facebook marketplace an hour away for $400, we offered him $300 and he took it!  SCORE!  The fabric will need to be recovered at some point to match the boat, but that is still low on the list at this point.  Yasha gave me full reigns on choosing the color.  So after 3 coats of primer, sanding between the second and third coats, I chose Awlgrip Purple.  Yes, Awlgrip has a factory purple.  They also have 2 shades of pink, I had the brighter pink as a back up.  We put the first coat of purple on and someone made a reference to Barny and the color had to go.  We softened the color by adding Snow White to it and put on the second coat.  The paint job was perfect!  And the color was nearly gray, I hated it.  NEXT!  I wasn't sold on the pink, so I mixed up the pink and red and made a watermelon sherbet color that I loved and we went with it!  (Yes, I am sanding between every coat.).  We started on the stern, Yasha rolling paint and I am following tipping with a small dry hot dog roller.  We new right away that something was off, but once you start, you have to keep going.  It seemed like it was really heavy with reducer at first, then the paint got super bubbly.  This is not good!  After we finished, we noticed that towards the end of the paint job we had pretty trippy textured color.  This paint job was done while it was raining near sunset.  We were under cover, but the humidity was at 90+ and the air temp was 85 degrees.  Our day job had us on the east coast and were on a time constraint that pushed us to push the limits of the suggested painting times, temperatures and humidity rates.  That coat dried horribly, was thin in some places and too heavy in others and I had to sand it off.  We dont really know for certain, but we think that maybe we forgot to stir the paint after mixing the 3 parts together.   Its really the only thing that makes sense.  Luckily, I had also mixed up a mango (cantaloupe, passionfruit, cumquat, peach) colored base.  That paint job came out beautiful and we loved the color.  This was a custom color that I made using Awlgrip fighting lady yellow, international orange and sunfast red into Snow White, my white base.  Unfortunately, she needed a second coat so I had to mix up the color again!  We called it close enough and a second coat was added for the win!  The yard that we were doing ALL of these paint jobs at has a policy that allowed us to roll and tip paint but not to spray, as there is a professional painting company on site that sprays and they get all of the spray jobs channeled to them.  We were told that the owner of that said company went into the office to complain that we had sprayed our paint job and when he was told that we had rolled it, he said impossible.  One cant roll and tip a job that perfectly!  BEST COMPLIMENT EVER!  We had a lot of practice by that last coat.  The eastern had seen 3 coats of primer and 5 coats of paint!  We had removed the large spray guards and were painting coats on them each time too.   We painted the topside of the rails and the aft storage area light blue custom mixing adding a smidge of awl grip flag blue into awl grip Snow White.  This practice is highly discouraged by all professional painters who claim that you can never get that paint mixed again to the same color in the event of needing touch up paint somewhere.  We just really enjoy having custom colors so we ignore this advice.  Pull up cleats replaced the standard cleats.  We tested the motor and found out her top speed with the current prop is a steady 25kts.  We were hoping for a little better, but "it is what it is."   :D  Below is a photo library of some of our work - Ill continue to update as the project t continues!  We use our tender primarily as transportation to the best kiteboarding spots, the best restaurants and to view sunsets and sometimes even sunrises.  We fish occationally with emphasis on the word occasionally.  Next big purchase will be the GPS.  I want the ray marine with the down vision - but its so expensive!