[Myfathersson]

It's Derby Weekend here in Louisville and the weather is freaking fantastic - 80° days and 0% chance of rain today thru Tuesday. So painting is on tap.

Over the past few weeks I've made some new hull supports. I wasn't overly fond of the stacked concrete blocks I used last summer so I took some scrap treated 2x6's I had and grabbed a couple 4x4's and 2x4's and made up these pylons:






And then earlier this week I set to the oh so fun chore of jacking up the hull and shimmying the trailer out from 'neath her.




Then set to fairing and sanding the hull to clean up where I sanded thru the old antifouling paint and in spots gelcoat, and the myriad of scratches from the PO beaching her regularly.

On the less dry days I cleaned up all the hatches, faired them and set the non-skid in a coat of epoxy to simplify the painting process.




The PO also mounted a swim ladder to the transom and put one of the screw holes right through the E in the HIN. I tried to dremel a new E in but it never looked very good. So I modeled up a negative of the HIN in Fusion360 and printed it on my 3D printer, packed the mold full of epoxy and milled fiber with a backer of 1708 and put it under a vacuum for an hour to yield this:




Lost the islands in a few of the digits but they read well enough that it works. Cut the old HIN out and glued the new casting in and faired it last night.


And finally this afternoon, after wrapping up a late post lunch meeting, I came home and set to spraying the primer:






Tomorrow morning I'll wet sand and start spraying the finish. With the fantastic weather I'll get 6 coats on her and be ready to install the fuel tank when it gets delivered next week. Just gotta order the new hoses and clamps to make final connections from the deck drains to the thru hulls for assembling the two halves.

Thanks for looking! - Greg