Coppercoat bottom finish

Welcome to PocketShip.net! This bulletin board is for builders of the Chesapeake Light Craft-John C. Harris "PocketShip" design, a 15-foot micro cruiser sailboat built from a kit or plans.

For more information on PocketShip, click here: http://www.clcboats.com/pocketship

This site gathers PocketShip builders in one place. Here you can share photos, tips, questions, and---eventually---your sailing adventures in PocketShip! CLC will also post design updates and tips here as they come up.

We'll try to knock down spam as quickly as possible.

UPDATE: An intermittent glitch is rejecting longtime users' attempts to log in, with a message saying the IP is banned. These users have NOT been banned; the solution is to try logging in again (several times if necessary). If that doesn't work, let us know and we will force a reactivation of your account. Thank you for your patience.

Moderator: John C. Harris

Forum rules
Spam or commercial posts will be deleted.
This is a civil forum: no flames or drunken tirades.
Please stay on-topic.
PocketShip's Web Page: http://www.clcboats.com/pocketship
If you need CLC customer service: http://www.clcboats.com/forms/contact_us.html
We'll try to delete spam as soon as it appears.

Coppercoat bottom finish

Postby slash2 on Fri Jun 09, 2023 6:37 pm

I mentioned elsewhere that I was thinking of using Coppercoat for my bottom finish. I did decide to go that route. My priorities are environmentally friendly, can stand trailering, can be left in the water for a week or two, and durability. Esthetics were secondary.
Coppercoat is an epoxy finish with fine particles of copper mixed in. The coating must be sanded to expose the copper. It comes in one size kit. So you buy enough based on your boat size. The Pocketship takes two kits based on my experience. You apply it in four thin coats, all in one day. You only need to wait 30 minutes or so between coats. Theoretically then I should have split each kit in half. However, since I was doing it on my own, I decided to split each kit into 4. Each of these was sufficient to coat about 3/4 of the hull bottom as well as the centerboard and rudder. This gave me enough working time to get a good coating down and also left me some extra for touch ups. It went well. You then need to wait a few days before sanding. They warn that waiting longer will make the sanding more difficult and, since I wasn’t able to get back to it for about 6 days, I can attest that it was harder, but not terrible. I did go through a lot of sanding disks.
The finish seems very hard and I think will be very durable. Since it is sanded, it will be a dull looking finish which may not appeal to some. See the picture of it against the Brightsides Sea Green side paint I used on the hull sides. You can also see it’s not perfectly uniform. Perhaps if I had sanded earlier I could have achieved a more uniform finish.
We’ll have to see how it performs over time, but from what I’ve read, I won’t have to revisit the bottom finish for a long time. Cost was about $200, which isn’t cheap, but isn’t too crazy for a bottom paint.
Attachments
IMG_3767.jpeg
Coppercoat
IMG_3767.jpeg (102.73 KiB) Viewed 7181 times
Steve Sawtelle
slash2
 
Posts: 173
Joined: Fri Jul 09, 2021 2:27 am

Return to PocketShip Forum

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests

cron