After completing the painting, the high quality finish really highlighted the poor state of the racks carbon work. So we added the additional task of redoing the racks.
Nick Harvey took on the work to fix and fair the damaged carbon work, but he quickly identified that a lot of the repairs would mean that we couldn’t show the carbon work in all places. In order to mask the repairs Nick decided to paint those areas black before we lacquered the racks. We also needed to add additional reinforcing of the new foot loops.
We used the reinforcing plates were epoxied to the racks and then finished before having a layer of carbon fibre over the top.
After that the racks were sanded with 80 Grit dry sandpaper. We sanded through the old lacquer finish so that the underlying composite was exposed. As ever the better the prep work the better the outcome.
After the sanding, as with the hull painting, the surfaces where cleaned, prepared for the lacquer to be sprayed.
The next stage was to mask off the areas which we didn’t want sprayed black, this again required a lot of time due to the complexity of the shape of the racks and not to affect the hull paint.
After the black spray we then rewrapped the boat exposing all of the racks and hiding the hull.
Two separate sprays of 3 coats of lacquer, the lacquer cures quickly, so we were able to complete the spraying in about 2 hours and then leave the boat to cure in the sunshine for the rest of the day.
