Shades of Gray

January 20, 2017 Hours spent building to date: 3,287

With a big assist from Ray, painted the hull with three coats of Interlux Brightsides “Seattle Gray.” It wasn’t all that hard with about an hour to sand between coats with 320 grit and an hour to paint. We used a “roll and tip-roll” technique with Ray applying the paint with a 7-inch West System foam roller and me following afterward with a 4-inch high density hardware store foam roller. The key is to move really fast to be working in truly wet paint all the time. The little roller picks up any misses, pops air bubbles and really evens every thing out. The final vertical roller stroke (the equivalent of “tipping” with a brush) seems to take out almost all the roller stiple.

There are some bumps and ripples where my fairing wasn’t the best, but altogether this is a great, shiny finish. Frankly, I am tempted to redo the deckhouse with Brightsides. Even though I like the TotalBoat Wet Edge shade (Oyster), I just don’t think it went on as well and I still have some problem areas with brush strokes. Ray cut in the trim with a brush on the hull, and in those areas I see zero problems using the Brightsides.

The color choice goes back more than 20 years. We were building a couple Sam Devlin Pollywog skiffs at WoodenBoat School, and Sam used a tie coat that was about half white and half gray. We ran out of time before applying the top coat, but it didn’t matter — the boats looked great out on the water. On workboats Sam said he often just leaves them “tie-coat gray” and I have liked light gray boats ever since. Also, the color of the window trim virtually matches the hull color, which really ties the deckhouse and hull together visually.

In between coats, I framed out and finished the dinette settee. Quite comfortable even without cushions, and the storage below is voluminous.