Coppercoat bottom finish

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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.
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Steve Sawtelle
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