J/30 Class Association Forums J/30 Forum The Boat, Sails and Equipment Mast painting

This may have been discussed before, but I can't seem to find it with search...

How were the original black masts painted? If I remember right, it was a "powder coating".

What is a good process to refinish one of these masts? (besides waiting for it to fail and getting a new one)

Dennis

I don't remember seeing this discussed before I had Falcon's mast algripped a couple of years ago looks great

What ever you do you will need to strip all of the fittings off which means drilling out the stainless pop rivets Its a fair amount of work but the end result is worth it When you put it back together you need to use the special dielectric grease so that you don't get the stainless interacting with the aluimium

The black spars appear to be anodized, in my opionion

Peel Away 7 available from Home Depot softens the black paint and can then be scraped off quite easily, takes two applications to get most of the black paint off, followed by sanding, cleaning with Alumiprep33, etching with Alodine1201 and applying Awlgrip as specified.

When rebuilding ZV2, we used a green colored primer and painted the mast using the same Awl-Grip paint as the hull. I remember asking Scottie if we could paint the mast the original Zephyr color blue and he talked me out of it. To remove the old paint from the mast, I used an orbital sander with a vacuum. Slightly apply pressure to remove the paint. When the mast ws down, we washed the inside with a pressure washer. Don't forget this is the best time to replace the shives :>) There are no baking soda sandblasting type paint removal shops in New Orleans. I recommend investigating this option to save some time. Sanding a mast to bare aluminum is about a 20-30 hour project. I found this story about us rebuilding ZV2. It was never published and still is considered a draft. Enjoy. http://noyc.org/zephyr/TheZV2Story.pdf Dave