Detail to watch out for on a brand new boat
I just finished a bottom job on my 1991 Catalina 34, and based on what I found, if I were buying a new boat today I would insist on specific wording in the purchase contract that guarantees that the mold release wax be properly removed, and the bottom be properly prepared, before bottom paint is applied. On my boat I found many places, as much as 15 to 20% of the bottom surface where the bottom paint was just spontaneously peeling off right down to the gelcoat. This can be a very insidious problem because (outside of areas that are already peeled off) the bottom paint looks sound when you haul it out, and in a quick-turnaround bottom job there is a tendency to paint over the old paint and get the boat back in the water as soon as possible. What you end up with is multiple layers of bottom paint which are adhering well to each other, but are very loosely attached, or not attached at all, to the underlying gelcoat. I don't know whether this would be considered a manufacturing defect or a commissioning error, but if you are in the process of buying a brand new boat you should be able to make sure somebody does this right.I'll try to include a picture of one of my peeled patches. It looks like the picture upload worked, so I'll add a little detail. All around the perimeter of this bare patch, the surrounding paint is very sound, well attached, and was very difficult to remove. I ended up removing all the paint because I found several places where previous bottom jobs (done by commercial boatyard staff) had included sanding the bare patches and "feathering in" the border between sound paint and bare gelcoat. That suggested to me that it is really impossible to tell by looking at a square foot of bottom paint whether it is really perfectly sound and 100% attached, or just attached around the edges and held together by the multiple layers of bottom paint bonded to each other. This suspicion was confirmed when I applied chemical paint remover to areas that looked sound. In some cases it took multiple applications of the remover, and lots of scraping, to remove well-adhered paint. In other areas, where the paint looked completely sound, the paint remover immediately caused the paint to split, curl up, and fall off due to its own weight without any scraping at all. This was one hell of a job and I hope I never have to do it again. It would have been unnecessary if the mold wax had been properly removed in the first place.Good luck with your purchase.Mark