Refinished rubrail

The rubrail is the wooden strip along the side of the hull that acts as a bumper.  For some reason, the Valiant factory built the rubrail out of two strips of fir closest to the hull, and a strip of teak on top of those.  Fir is not so waterproof.  The previous varnish was peeling up, etc, and the fir was rotting in a handfull of places.  Water was wicking down the gap between the wood and the hull, and rusting the bolts that hold it to the boat.  It was time to take care of it, before more drastic repairs became necessary.  Aside: there was no worry of the strength of the rail-hull connection.  Valiant used a bolt every foot to fasten that rubrail to the hull, so a few rusting bolts is no concern.

We elected to paint the rail rather than varnishing it, for two primary reasons: 1) varnishing is way more work, both in the beginning and ongoing maintenance, than paint  2) after filling the rotted areas with filling compound, varnishing over them would not have resulted in a particularly pretty final appearance, which is half of the purpose of varnishing

This was our workflow:

1) Strip off old varnish with heat-gun and scraper (get a good scraper, it was worth every bit of the $30 I spent)

2) Dig out rotted, soft areas as best as possible with scraper and chisel

3) Sand with 80 grit.  Buy and use a Fein Tool!  Damn that thing is sweet.

4) Soak rotted areas with penetrating epoxy (i don’t recommend this step, it was a mistake, more below)

5) Fill rotted areas, voids, low spots, etc with QuikFair, which is a two-part epoxy fairing compound.  QuikFair rocks.  It is easy to mix, a perfect consistency to spackle on, and a pleasure to sand afterwards.  We were in a rush and only did one round (one application of quikfair, then sand).  I recommend leaving the time and finding the patience to go through at least one more round of fairing–after sanding down the quikfair the first time you’ll find that it didn’t get perfectly flat and smooth, so fair it and sand it again.

6) Sand with 120 grit

7) Apply Interlux Primekote.  It’s a two-part epoxy primer that goes on really thick.  Probably too thick–we probably should have thinned it some.  But it is supposed to go on thick, and seal.  We put it on with the intent of really waterproofing the rail.  I would definitely recommend an epoxy primer like this one, for this job.

8) Sand 220 grit–since the epoxy primer didn’t self-level very well, there were some ridges and high spots to sand down fair

9) Paint 3 coats of Interlux Brightside, sanding with 300 grit between coats (just for giving tooth for the next coat).  We did not thin and it didn’t seem necessary, but be careful it sags pretty readily, even out of the can.  Meaning that you’ll put on what you think is a normal amount of paint, and then 10 minutes later you’ll see that it’s running down the side of the hull on you, and you’ll wish you had spread it out more.

10) On top of the second coat and the final coat, shake on non-skid beads (Interlux Intergrip, or whatever).  We want to be able to stand on the rubrail without slipping, and the nonskid had the added benefit of cutting down the gloss–the rest of our boat is worn down, dirty, and dull, and the gloss was starting to make the rest of the boat look bad.

11) Lay bead of 4200UV down the top seam.  The paint did a good job of sealing the crack–for now.  I didn’t want to take any chances, because you know that it will flex and soon enough there will be space at the joint again for water to wick in.  I was planning on using lifecaulk but Wally Bryant headed me off just in time–because that spot needs a product with UV inhibitors, like 4200.  Since we’ll have to strip it off and renew it eventually, we elected not to use 5200 (which is effectively a permanent glue).

I’m fully satisfied with the result.  It looks good and it certainly does the job (it’s protected).  Jon sort of misses the wood look, but agrees with the wisdom of painting it.