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**minaret** · 17-12-2012, 13:40

Looked into a Farrow rig here, apparently my boss rented one for a bottom to try it out. He said it was too slow for him, and they wanted 40k for the big rig you use for boat bottoms. That's a lot of capital to recoup! I'll post a link to the guys who rent them here in Seattle later.

AtlanticGreenPro · 17-12-2012, 14:03

Quote:

Originally Posted by minaret

What does it cost? It takes our yard laborers about two days to do a similar bottom paint removal with sanders, that's $800. What kind of surface profile does the medium leave? And what if the gel coat is blistered and must also be removed? Obviously bottom paint is much softer than gel, so it's easy to remove bottom paint on top of gel. But removing gel from glass is a whole different story, particularly if you want to keep the hull fair, as the gel thickness tends to vary substantially on a given hull. This sure looks much easier and cleaner for the operator, but I'm not sure it would be easier on the boat owners wallet.

Our yard has done soda blasting and bead blasting in the past. We quit bothering with any type of blasting because of all the extra hours in set up and clean up, just having our guys sand the bottom old school is much faster. Once it's tented I can do a 50 footer in a day. No special expensive tool required. Just lots of hard work.

What does the machine cost? Sure would be nice to have one in the yard, but if it's so expensive that you have to charge a premium it's not worth it for us. It looks like you guys do a lot of non marine work to keep the machine busy paying for itself?

What's it cost?
Cost wise most blasters in the Northeast charge between $50 and $60 a linear foot for sailboats between 40' and 50' and with a lot of these new 50' sailboats they've become extremely wide as in 14' and 15' at the beam meaning that there's a lot more real estate to blast down there.

What if the gel-coat is blistered?
Here's a video we just did on a boat that had had thousands of these 5/8" blisters over it's entire bottom:
blisteredbottom - YouTube
The process actually opens up the blisters and cleans them out.

How long does it take to do a 50' footer?
You're looking at one day, (7 to 8 hour) but on some boats hard ablative it could be up to two days to do a 50' boat.

How is it on removing Gel-Coat?
I suppose that's something you'd want to do with some type of sander... this process wasn't intended to remove Gel-Coat.

What's the finish like?
It's something like 100 grit sand paper meaning it has the perfect profile for barrier paint.

Work wise I'd say that 80% of what we do is in the Historic restoration and renovation of buildings, but 20% of what we do is boats.