underwater Hull Refit – the start
In 2004 Frank and I carried out a local re-glueing and sealing of the underwater hull due to considerable leakage between the keelson and the hull itself. Now, 20 years later, it is definitely time, to overhaul the complete hull and of course we will start this work beneath the waterline. As a stable high developed around Northern Germany, I immediately took the opportunity to start grinding (the ship is open air at the moment), to remove all the different layers of the 50 years old coating until finest mahogany wood became visible. I managed to proceed approximately 4.0 m on both sides of the hull, starting at the bow. The work was performed with a standard Bosch excentre grinder, bunches of sanding paper (grit 40), a Kärcher vacuum cleaner and the most important tool, a DeWalt cyclone separator. Without an adequate extraction system, especially a powerful separator, you would disperse tons of dust everywhere, which alone will get you in big trouble with your neighbours and the authorities. Also you will look like a coal miner and waste vast numbers of sanding paper. However, as you see on the photos below I wear full body protection, especially a full-face mask with double P3 filters, because the extraction system may work to 98%, but the remaining 2% are still flying around and are bad enough. Now the naked hull gets the opportunity to dry out during winter, so next spring we can proceed with glueing and sealing with epoxy. Due to the big volume of this major project I don’t expect us to finish the whole job in 2025, so we will work in stages again, similar to the deck project. We still need some free days for sailing :-). Above the waterline a simplified approach is feasible, as only a few seams at the surface are exposed.
