Micron 66 ?

[Acadia]

Well i guess I will have to give it a try. Not looking forward to sanding that bottom paint though..........


Thanks

[fstbttms]

On the plus side, with proper maintenance, it'll last 3 years.

[thinwater]

I easily get 2 years with M66 in the Chesapeake, 24 months in the water. I don't like scrubbing, but I do sail every week or 2, all year. Some slime, but no hard fouling. I don't know if I would get 3 years if I hauled in the winter, but I don't, and that saves big. I like the reduced paint build up. I used Micron products on my last boat for years and never had to strip. That is ease of use.

As for difficulty of use, I don't mean to offend, but something was done incorrectly. It is as easy to use, IMHO, as any high-copper bottom paint. Perhaps a bit of thinner should have been added and the paint well mixed, I don't know. I found the coverage to be exactly average.

If I were a racer and scrubbed, I believe Trinidad SR sounds like the best call. But I don't.

[fstbttms]

Originally Posted by thinwater

I easily get 2 years with M66 in the Chesapeake, 24 months in the water.

Performance like this is not to be expected in regions of high fouling, like Florida. Or California, for that matter. Check out these pix of a Micron 66 bottom, several uncleaned months after splashing in SF Bay:

[off-the-grid]

Are you sure that's Micron 66? It only comes in a darker tealish blue. Similar to the new color for the board. May be Micron Extra? It comes in that color.

[fstbttms]

Originally Posted by grunzster

Are you sure that's Micron 66?

100% sure.

[Acadia]

Fstbttms,

define "proper maintenance"

Do you really need scheduled cleaning? What if I only clean it when I have time or want to go out, will the paint last as long? Either way, for me it is more cost effective to clean myself when I need it VS hire someone, even if I have to haul out sooner. Just curious as to what your opinion is on this, perhaps I should dive more often.

As for the color of the Paint in those pictures, I do remember noticing that it looked much lighter in the water (diving) than when I had just finished painting it. It does look lighter in those pictures though, but that could be the camera.

[off-the-grid]

Originally Posted by Acadia

As for the color of the Paint in those pictures, I do remember noticing that it looked much lighter in the water (diving) than when I had just finished painting it. It does look lighter in those pictures though, but that could be the camera.

Good point. Fstbttms get yourself some strobes

[fstbttms]

Originally Posted by Acadia

Fstbttms,

define "proper maintenance"

Do you really need scheduled cleaning? What if I only clean it when I have time or want to go out, will the paint last as long? Either way, for me it is more cost effective to clean myself when I need it VS hire someone, even if I have to haul out sooner. Just curious as to what your opinion is on this, perhaps I should dive more often.

By "proper maintenance" I mean that the bottom should never be allowed to become foul enough so that the gentlest cleaning method cannot be used. Typically, in high fouling regions, this means cleaning every 3-4 weeks. If you find you need something more abrasive than a piece of carpet or a white pad to clean your hull, you are letting your bottom get too dirty. Using tools more abrasive than these means you are scrubbing your expensive anti fouling paint off into the water and shortening its lifespan. By cleaning your hull frequently and gently, you will reduce your haulout frequency, your fuel consumption and carbon emissions while increasing your boat's performance and your enjoyment of it.

By using in-water hull cleaning Best Management Practices, you can stretch (for instance) a Trinidad bottom to 3 years of good use. Over the course of 10 years of ownership, this saves you the cost of an entire bottom job when compared to maintenance techniques that afford you only 2 years out of the same paint.

[Microship]

Thanks for the tips various - I just splashed a week or two ago after a Micron 66 job on my steel hull (red indicator layer and top blue, with cayenne for good measure). This is just the nudge I need to overcome inertia and make sure I do more sailing, even through the long project phase. And the suggestion about cleaning with soft cloth corroborates advice from the yard.

It was an expensive upcharge on the commercial bottom job, and I also did a huge amount of work myself to grind/etch/primer some bare spots and the entire underside of the keel (clearly ignored in previous haulouts before my time... see photo below). Trilux had been suggested, but research turned up the fact that it is primarily intended for aluminum - I spent some time on the phone with an Interlux engineer and that convinced me.

Good excuse for more time on water!

Steve
S/V Nomadness

[thinwater]

Originally Posted by fstbttms

By "proper maintenance" I mean that the bottom should never be allowed to become foul enough so that the gentlest cleaning method cannot be used. Typically, in high fouling regions, this means cleaning every 3-4 weeks. If you find you need something more abrasive than a piece of carpet or a white pad to clean your hull, you are letting your bottom get too dirty. Using tools more abrasive than these means you are scrubbing your expensive anti fouling paint off into the water and shortening its lifespan. By cleaning your hull frequently and gently, you will reduce your haulout frequency, your fuel consumption and carbon emissions while increasing your boat's performance and your enjoyment of it.

By using in-water hull cleaning Best Management Practices, you can stretch (for instance) a Trinidad bottom to 3 years of good use. Over the course of 10 years of ownership, this saves you the cost of an entire bottom job when compared to maintenance techniques that afford you only 2 years out of the same paint.

And what is the cost of cleaning, say 12x per year, so that we can total that in. I have never asked.

I know it's your living, I know it gives the fastest bottom, but I'm not going to clean the bottom more than 1x per year, I would have to add professional cleaning, and the cleanings from November to March are going to be grim affairs. Our water tends to get hard occasionally.

[fstbttms]

Here is the math for 10 years of ownership of a 40' sailboat, based on hull cleaning rates in the Bay Area ($2.25/foot):

3-month schedule (painted every 2 years)

$2700 bottom job X 5 = $13,500
$90.00 hull cleaning (4 times/year X10) = $3600
Total expenditure (10 years) = $17,100


2-month schedule (painted every 3 years)

$2700 bottom job X 3 = $8100
$90.00 hull cleaning (6 times/year X10) = $5400
Total expenditure (10 years) = $13,500

Total savings = $3600

Clean your bottom as infrequently as you like, but the fact of the matter is; if you let the bottom get even moderately foul and have to use anything but the softest scrubber to clean it, you are removing paint unnecessarily, thereby reducing its lifespan, increasing pollution and costing you money.

[Microship]

That's some interesting data - thanks!

With the disclaimer that I'll first take some proper dive training, I'm planning to do at least some of those cleanings myself... the on-board compressor in the boat's lab is oil-less for that reason. Dive services are highly variable; last winter my Max-Prop remained unzinc'd for a few months because the folks were stymied by metric and then forgot to get back to it. No visible harm done, but it was somewhat unsettling.

It goes back to the DIY-adage I started muttering after a plumbing nightmare in 2008: "Nobody in the world cares as much about your boat as you do."

Fstbttms - I know the bottom-paint topic is fraught with emotion and I'm certainly no expert, but I'm glad to feel that my intensive research leading to the expensive Micron 66 decision is validated... assuming I sail frequently and keep her clean, of course.

Steve

[off-the-grid]

If you're a diver and a DIYer, my estimate is that the savings will still be about $2200 over the course of 10 years. All of a sudden, I've found a way to get paid for diving

[colemj]

We are on our 15th month of Micron 66. We put in on in the Chesapeake, traveled to New England, back to the Chessy, down to FL, through the Bahamas, PR, VI and the Eastern Caribe chain to Grenada. We had zero growth for the first 10 months, with most of the time in FL, Bahamas and PR. Not a thing until we hit the Caribe. For the next two months, we had very light slime that was easily wiped off with a soft cloth barely touching the surface. No hard growth ever.

Then we hit Grenada and we started to get little seed barnacles. Most of these came off with a white scotchbrite, but some required "popping" off with something harder. But things deteriorated quickly after that. I left the boat with a clean bottom for two weeks on a mooring and when I came back it was covered with barnacles. I had to take a plastic scrapper to them and really work. Now the bottom is covered with little white spots that used to be barnacles. I don't know how the paint will perform now, but suspect I will be scraping regularly.

I don't know if this is good performance or not. All previous paints, including a wide range of hard and ablative but not Trinidad, didn't perform anywhere near as well as Micron 66.

However, I had hoped to get 2-3 years out of the 3 coats (4 at waterline). The paint is still on the boat (the indicator coat is only showing through on the edge of the bow and the bottom of the keel where we touched a couple times). However, its effectiveness seems to have given up the ghost.

Mark