removing antifouling

[kynaston]

I have just had a both pleasant and nasty experience while talking to my boat yard. The nice bit was to arrange a date to crane her in. As kemara is a new aquisition, this is highly exciting and also makes the current freeze more bearable -so long as it has thawed by April!

The not so nice bit is the reason for this posting. There are a great many layers of old antifouling on the boat and as we have taken the plunge and gone for coppercoat it all needs to come off. The boatyard quoted around £400! My question therefore is, can anyone suggest an alternative? We are prepared to face scraping it off but would appreciate some help rather than doing it all dry. We notice that International do a thing called interstrip, has anyone used this successfully?

All contributions gratefully received.

 

[BootleBumtrinket]

Interstrip is surprisingly pleasant and easy to use, but maybe because of this, in my experience only does one coat at a time: that is to say you would have to use repeated coats.

If you have the money (I didn't) pay the yard!



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[snowleopard]

the only stripper that really works

is the one at the pub on a friday night.

after trying various miracle gunges i ended up scraping it off with a chisel! after a while the brain goes quite numb and it becomes therapeutic.

attempts to use abrasive and skarsten scrapers damaged the underlying layers.

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[EdEssery]

£400 is a bargain - go for it.

I am just finishing stripping the anti-fouling off my 27'6" boat see and <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.essery.demon.co.uk/images/StbdAft.JPG> here for (big) pictures. I haven't done my keel and rudder (no need). So far it's taken 6.5 litres of Dilunett (Caustic Soda) Chemical Stripper which was applied in two separate applications at a purchase cost of nearly £70, three weekends totalling 40 man hours most of which was consumed in two working parties one of two people and one of four. How much is your time worth and do you have a willing enough crew?

Stripping anti-fouling is the a**e end of owning a boat!

£400 sounds an absolute bargain...

Good luck!

Ed

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[extravert]

Last year I took all my old antifoul off down to gelcoat using Interstrip. It does what it says on the tin, but slowly. It doesn't get it all off in one go. It seems to re-disolve the paint and you get lots of sticky gunge that you have to scrape off. The most important thing not to do is to let this re-disolved gunge dry again, which is does quite quickly. It then becomes really hard to get off.

Despite what BootleBumtrinket said, I didn't find it pleasant to use at all. It stinks. It is caustic and hurts if you get it on your skin and especially in your eyes. It dissolved every type of protective glove I tried. It's really messy, sticks to everything, ruins clothes and shoes, goes through overalls, sticks and sets on everything you touch (car door, other bits of the boat, tools, passing strangers, cat etc...).

It's also expensive as it doesn't cover anything like it says on the tin, and takes ages.

On the positive side, it gives a really good finish, and you get lots of sympathy from passers by (marina cat excluded).

Do any other marinas have their own cat other than Bosun at Pwllheli?

<hr width=100% size=1>Adventures of the <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.xrayted.fsnet.co.uk>Teddy Bear Boat</A>

 

[mikewilkes]

For £400 you should not even be thinking of doing it. Give the guys the money, they will earn it, and go off to the pub. I gave 900 of these euro things to a boat yard last oct and went to the bar while they sand blasted both hulls, ok she's steel, and put on two coats of blast prime. It was actually quite pleasent a few days later to sit on a box and put some antifouling paint on.

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[quaelgeist2]

Dilunet worked - particularly well if you exceed the recommended stay-on time (by about 400% - not in dry weather though!) and have a powerwasher to drive the stuff off afterwards. Check the area before the caustic soda is worse than what you would believe. Without cover on the skin it melts the skin quickly.

Alternatively try blasting, e.g. walnut shells or so. Many services advertised in the journals or google.

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[sjohn_gibson]

If you do not want to spend £400, then try an electric scrapper.

I used a Bosch - I think it cost me about £30 - the vibrating blade chipped of the numerous layers with ease. Equally, the scrapper blade did not dig into the gel coat.

If you feel you really want to do it, then this is the way I would recommend.

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[Andy_H]

We had a Centaur a couple of years ago and undertook the very unpleasant and hard task of removing all the antifouling with a tungsten scraper.
Having started the job it had to be finished, but at that point if someone had come along and offered to do it for £400 I'd have jumped at it!
I know it's a lot of money you really don't want to spend but in my experience it would be money well spent.

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[AndrewB]

Sanding off.

I did my yacht this year by first blasting off the old antifouling with a high pressure hose aimed about 1" from the surface, then sanding the remains with an orbital sander. Its possible, provided you have a decent primer underneath, to get off the antifouling quite smoothly without damaging the surface of the yacht.

The dust is of course toxic. It is imperative to wear a proper face mask, goggles, and cover up your skin. If there is any chance that lower layers of antifouling are TBT, safety levels need to be higher. The antifouling should be kept damp during sanding, and care taken regarding neighbours.

But this method is comparatively quick. I had my 38 footer done in a day.

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[butler]

£400 what a bargain! go for it ,save yourself tons of hassle, last time i did my boat it took me a fortnight to get over it,
regards chris,
p.s get the quote in writing before they start.

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[kynaston]

Thankyou all. I knew that once we had discarded the option of paying someone else to do the job for us it was going to be an 'orrible smelly and poisnous job'. We are going to try Sjohn_Gibson's advice and see how we get on with that, otherwise it will be the old fashioned scraper and interstrip/Dilunett! Not a nice prospect but at least the coppercoat should mean we don't have to do it again!


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[Trevor_swfyc]

I stripped my antifoul 3 years ago took me two weeks @ 2hrs a day with a scrapper hard work and after 2hrs I had had enough. The plus side was I took great care not to damage the glassfibre hull.

A friend decided to strip his glassfibre yacht but was not prepared to scrape the antifoul off. He had a contractor do the job (High pressure sandblaster) he first directed it on the steel keels producing instant shine. When I saw the completed job it looks as though half the gellcoat has gone. The force was so great all the filler from the steel keels was displaced Ho Hum./forums/images/icons/frown.gif

Trevor



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[clyst]

Re: Sanding off.

What about the poor chaps in neighbouring boats did you give them masks as well cos its toxic to others in the area .

Regards

Terry

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[toad]

If it is thick and crusty use a pull type scraper,i did a 27foot hull in a weekend on my own.It depends on what price you put on your time.

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[Trevor_swfyc]

Re: Sanding off.

TBT am I not right in saying that this has been banned for at least 10 yrs, so I guess the strip back was well due.

As for neighbours never watch it! /forums/images/icons/wink.gif

Trevor

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[vyv_cox]

Coppercoat

Suggest you don't put too much faith in this product. Even allowing for the fact that dissatisfied users are more likely to complain than satisfied ones to praise, it would seem that there is less than a 50% success rate. My experience has not been good, both as regards the difficulty of getting the stuff on and its ability to repel fouling. Search this forum and you will find plenty of threads on the subject.

Whether you pay someone to scrape off your old antifouling or not, my strong advice would be not to apply Coppercoat/Copperbot yourself. Get a professional to do it in the controlled environment that it needs (unless you live in southern Spain or similar)

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[cngarrod]

Hi,

Where do i find an electric scrapper??

Haven't seen one of them and am about to do fy first anti foul strip job this weekend... from the details on here, i am REALLY looking forward to it (NOT!)

Thanks,

Craig.

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[AndrewB]

TBT

In the UK, TBT was banned for application on yachts in July 1987, and in most northern Europe countries around the same time. But I last bought TBT antifouling for yachts in Spain in 1995, so there was still some on my keel.

It has continued to be used, even by yachts, until right up to the present. The Marine Environmental Protection Committee, under the auspices of the IMO, introduced a world-wide ban on applying it on 1st Jan 2003, at which point International (Akzo-Nobel) and Blakes (Hempel) agreed to discontinue selling it. The same ruling specifies that all existing coats must be removed by 2008. Boats over 24m have to carry certification that they comply with the antifouling rules. (However I don't believe this ruling had been formally ratified in international law by 1.1.03).

TBT was a serious pollutant but at least it worked. The copper based substitutes are very poor. I've decided this year not to apply antifouling at all, just use a conventional bitumen based paint (like the barges use) and see what the fouling is like. It saves £200 per annum compared with the antifoul that, frankly, doesn't do a lot. For that money I'll put up with a couple of mid-season scrubs - I'm doing them already.

Like Vyv_cox, the local reports I've heard of Copperbot/coat make it sound not sufficiently long lasting to be good value. More people locally seem to be asking about how to get it off than how to put it on.

 

[Guest]

Re: TBT

have a relative in the channel islands who tells me that some locals adopt the strategy of not using antifoul at all, but giving the boat a couple of power washes during the season. they spray the hull with relatively strong domestic bleach from a garden sprayer, let this kill off the vegetation and moluscs for an hour or so, then pressure washing is quite easy.


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