I stripped all the ancient hard antifouling from our 19' sailboat this spring and it was a real pain, so I have much sympathy for those of you stripping larger boats.
- sanding was way too slow, hard and it fills the air with toxic blue dust. Bunny-suit and respirator definitely necessary
- our bottom paint was too hard to scrape, and scraping was more likely to cause gelcoat injury
- solvent based strippers were either ineffective, TOO effective (attacked gel-coat) or dried in 90 min and were harder to remove in any case
Long story short, I tried everything from sanding, scraping, pressure-wash, and a few different types of chemical stripper,
and the absolute best technique for me was using a soy-based stripper:
- no dust, no fumes, no toxicity to the clean product, therefore no respirator or bunny-suit required while applying. Rubber gloves and an old shirt recommended for removal, but that's only because of the dissolved bottom paint
- can be left on for a day or two
- doesn't harden, removed by easy scraping with a drywall knife, or pressure-washed off. The scrapings/runoff are obviously considered toxic waste and must be dealt with properly
- it strips to the gel-coat, but doesn't harm it
Even so it still took me 2 passes to remove all the blue. Maybe I wasn't putting it on thick enough
The best-priced soy stripper I could find was
Franmar Soy-Strip, and I had to track down the only Canadian importer and order it from them. I understand there are other makes of soy stripper out there as well.
