[Miles Offshore]

One of the worst jobs inn the world. When you say old paint then I have to assume that its the old "hard" type of paint and not the ablative type used a lot these days.

I have attaemted and been fairly succesful at removing :a lot" of paint but not all of it by , scraping, sandinding, using paint remover, etc. Sanding did the best job, but it is nasty. IYou need to wear old clothes, resperator ,painters hood, and safety glasses. Otherwise you will end up with blue bottom paint(or whatever color) up your nose. in your ears eyelids hair, and any other orifice that is not covered. Been there and done that. Take a wide paint scraper fiirst , attach it to a pole like a broomstick using hose clamps and scrape off the fairly loose paint thjat you can. A lot of the outer layer can be removed this way. After that its down and dirty. I am going to haul mine soon and willl do some my self but not a complete job. A lot of layers of paint can accumulate in 20 /25 years also and getting a clean gelcoat is not possible I dont believe.You will probably notice a blister or 2 and this would be a good time to repair it also.

For anyone with an inboard, I have invented a good way to clean your shaft (see pictures)with relative ease of barnacles, slime etc. Snce my shaft is 1 1/4 " diameter, [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] , I take a slightly larger steel punch, hole cutter , 1 3/8"-1 1/2 first and remove a little over hafy of the cutting edge of the punch. It should fit slightly over your shaft to provide the most surface area when scraping. then scrape the outer most area of the shaft using this method. I then attach the punch to a broom stick, section of old outrigger, etc and use this for the remaining 4/5/ft ofthe shaft. very effective and it saves a lot of cuts on the hands. I then go back with sandpaper , fairly coarse, hold it around the shaft , spinning the shaft as nessesary to make it nice and pretty- Im still working on better/easier ways to do the wheel, strt etc. Good luck-craig