Boat Maintenance

Letters to Practical Sailor, May 2011. This month's letters cover subjects such as: BoatU.S. Insurance, Marinco, Rigging and More!

Hydro-powered hull scrubber takes slime off but not barnacles. Bottom-scrubbing is definitely one of our least favorite boat chores. And because the warm Florida waters are the perfect nursery for hull-fouling slime and barnacles, we’re always on the lookout for products that will make the never-ending hull cleaning more bearable. That quest recently led us to try the Subscrub, a device that allows users to clean their boat hulls without hauling out or going for a…

Practical Sailor tested a half-dozen 2- to 3-inch, natural-bristle brushes marketed for use with oil-based coatings. The test field covered a range of bristle types, bristle shapes, handle styles, and prices, representing those most often found in marine chandleries and hardware stores. At paint-makers Interlux and Epifanes' suggestions, we compared good-quality badger-hair and China-bristle brushes when we applied two-part linear polyurethane paints to the fiberglass hull of PS's Catalina 22. The test brushes included the Seafit Flagship badger-hair brushes found at West Marine and made by Red Tree Industries; the Wooster Brush Co.'s white-China bristle brush; the Omega Lily ox-bristle brush available through Epifanes; and a few hardware-store-brand brushes from Ace Hardware, Benjamin Moore Paints, and Purdy Professional Painting Tools.

There are as many different techniques for brush care and cleaning as there are different brushes. Here are some tips that weve found to be effective and fairly easy to carry out.

Brush choice depends on what the brush’s job will be (transferring paint, smoothing paint, etc.), the user’s preferences, and the project budget. The best brush isn’t necessarily the best brush for the project. You wouldn’t use a $40 brush that requires meticulous cleaning to paint the bilge or apply bottom paint, just as you wouldn’t use a throw-away chip brush to lay a final coat of varnish on the toerail—at least we wouldn’t.

Letters to Practical Sailor, April 2011. This month's letters cover subjects such as: WI-FI Solutions, Eco Antifouling, Laser News, Streamlight Headlight and more!

Letters to Practical Sailor, April 2011. This month's letters cover subjects such as: Seas Canvas Boat Covers, Ryamarine, Boatshoes.com and more!

The latest report on our ongoing bottom paint tests, this look at Practical Sailor's antifouling test panels includes 65 hard and ablative paints that have been submerged for 18 months. The test paints include those from Blue Water Paints, Epaints, Flexdel, Interlux, Pettit, Sea Hawk, West Marine, and Copper Coat. An experimental stick-on paint, BoatKote Laminate, was also tested. Some copper-laden perennial favorites again topped the ratings, but some eco-friendly antifoulants from Epaints also did surprisingly well. The report also compares the results of PS's long-term bottom paint test to those of a test conducted by the San Diego Unified Port District and funded by the Environmental Protection Agency. San Diego's “Final Report on Safer Alternatives to Copper Alternatives in Antifouling Paints for Marine Vessels” evaluated how well certain alternative antifouling paints (with limited or no harmful biocides) performed.

Paint companies, boatyards, and boat owners will no doubt be closely checking the impact of an antifouling report issued last month by the San Diego Unified Port District and funded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The paint samples were applied to 6-foot-by-2-foot fiberglass panels for testing. Testers follow the makers’ instructions for preparation and application. There were 11 samples per test panel. All but two samples had two coats of paint.