Dinghy Paint

Days down- 0

 

Our dinghy is pretty old.  We bought it with the boat, although it isn't as old as the boat is.   We wanted to paint it, since it was looking pretty bad, even after scrubbing for hours, and it was starting to wear in some spots.
 

Originally, we thought it would be funny to paint it yellow, so then we could call it a rubber ducky.  However, this brand of paint didn't make yellow- just red, orange, grey, white and black.  We needed 2 cans anyway to be able to cover the entire dinghy, so we decided we would paint below the rub rail black, and above the grey accent white.  In between the rub rail and the acent, we would paint black and white checkers.

The paint comes in 2 parts- a base coat and a top coat.  The base coat was very thick and we wound up having to thin it even more than what they said.  We also found that once it starts to dry you can't go over it again or it will just clump up.  The moment the paint touched the rubber it already started to dry.  Originally we were mixing the paint with a plastic spoon, but we found that it actually started drying on the spoon.  Eventually, we found that getting very little paint on the brush, dabing it, then quickly spreading it out as quick as possible worked best for application.  On the bottom of the dinghy we only did one coat, but we did 2-3 on the top, and did extra coats where it had blisters. 

The top coat went on a lot better.  For the bottom, we ultimately did 2 coats.  Since the base coat was grey and we were painting the top white, we had to do 4 coats.

The checkers inbetween were a royal pain.  We had to cut squares from the tape and line them up perfectly, even after that, some paint still leaked and we would up having to go over it again.

Ultimately, the paint was very expensive, but if $300 will save a $4,000 dinghy for a few more years, then it is worth it.

No Paint- Just Tape:

Base Coat on Bottom:

Top Coat on Bottom:

Top Coat on Top:

Checkers: