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rwilhite
Carrie 'N On
193 Posts |
 Posted - Apr 05 2011 : 17:20:28
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Okay folks, most of you have seen several of my recent posts on refinishing my 1994 VP DPS sterndrive and my quest to find VP special tools. I thought I would wrap all that together in a series of posts - the first of which is the sterndrive itself, the second is the VP 5.7L GLS engine refinish project and the third and last is the project to repair the engine stringers and all engine room wood in my 1994 Excel 26 SE vessel. I am certainly not an expert in any of these areas (well, maybe I am an expert on the engine stuff as I have been a gearhead all my life) and my intent here is to let others know what they are getting into when they think about undertaking one of these projects.
So here we go with the sterndrive repainting and refurbishing project. First some general information. This is a VolvoPenta DPS that was a total rebuild and repaint when I bought the boat six years ago. The sterndrive is made up of parts from 1994 through 1996 and the repaint was done by a car shop in Orlando right before I bought the boat.
All the inside mechanical parts and pieces are in great shape and the vessel has been very reliable since I owned it, but the appearance aspect has deteriorated rapidly, especially in the last four years since I take the boat yearly on our vacation and it spends two weeks at a stretch in salt water in either Plantation Key or Fort Meyers Beach Florida. The hull has ablative bottom paint so the critters don't attach to it, but the stern drive is a different story and blasting the lower unit with a 2400 psi pressure washer takes the stuff off you can see, but not the stuff you can't get to. That pressure washer is also hard on the paint and my entire stern drive looked pretty ratty, so I started this project along with the project to replace the engine stringers, which had rotted out along with every piece of wood in the engine compartment except the transom. Here is what the unit looked like after removal from the vessel:
My first thought was to pay a marina to repaint the drive, but the two quotes I got were both in excess of $4,000 which I thought was outrageous, and they warranted their work for ZERO days since the boat is used exclusively in salt water in Florida. Oh, and that was after I removed all components from the vessel and brought them to them.
Gotta love the Internet! After extensive research I thought I could this job better and cheaper myself. I knew I would need a media blaster and big compressor since the Craftsman 6 cufm compressor I had would not do the job. Harbor Freight had a 20 pound pressurized media blaster for $60 that came with a hood and ceramic blast tips. I ordered that along with an air dryer and 50 pounds of 80 grit glass bead media.
Here's the media blaster which actually holds 25 lbs of media rather well.
On Christmas Eve I was wandering around my local Lowes and they had a Campbell Hausfeld 18 cfm four-cylinder, 230 VAC compressor with an 80 gallon tank on sale that day only for $750, normal price $1499, so I jumped on that. I also ended up buying and installing an in-line moisture filter and a dessicant dryer - all from HF again. Here is what the installation looks like in my work shop:
I built a blast cabinet out of 1x2 PT lumber and 6 mil sheet plastic stapled to the lumber. The cabinet is 3x4x3 and is light enough to pick up and move from my workshop out to the driveway that goes up to my workshop. When blasting, I cover half the front opening with plywood and then use two other pieces of plywood to close off all of the front opening I don't need to use to access the piece I am working on. I am recovering about 95% of my blast media and recycling it using a fine seive that I also bought from Harbor Freight.
A tip here - the hood that came with the blaster is okay for about 30 minutes of blasting. Go to the HF web site and buy the blaster hood that has the incorporated helmet and ventilator pockets. Oh, and absolutely, positively go buy a respirator from your local Lowes or Home Depot - the cheap disposable lower face masks (the ones that look like what you see so many Japanese using don't cut it.) Cost for those is about $39 and worth every penny.
Here is view 1 of my home-made blast cabinet:
Another view of the blast cabinet:
The dark spot in the rear is where I managed to poke the end of the drive shaft through the 6 mil thick plastic and then patched it with duct tape.
Here is what the cabinet looks like when I have it set up for blasting. I am using scraps of plywood and have a total of maybe $30 tied up in this blast cabinet:
Another view:
I ended up separating the upper and lower units because they were just too big and too damned heavy to maneuver around in my home-made blast cabinet. I started using all 80 grit glass beads but they did not cut the old primer very well although they blasted the top coat off as pretty as you could please. Back to Harbor Freight where I ordered a 44 lb container of aluminum oxide grit - also about 80 grit - and I mixed that in with the glass beads at a ratio of about 60% glass beads and 40% aluminum grit. This did a much better job of cutting right down to the bare aluminum and leaving a finely peened finish that was totally free of primer and top coat as well as all corrosion and barnacle shells. It takes me about 40 minutes to go through a 25 lb fill in the blaster and this will strip maybe a square foot of surface, so it is slow going. I ended up ordering another 100 lbs of glass bead media and another 25 pounds of aluminum oxide grit for the whole project.
Here is the result of the media blasting:
Upper unit starboard side:
Upper unit starboard side from the rear:
Lower unit:
Gimbal ring before bead blasting:
Gimbal ring view 2 before bead blasting:
Gimbal ring after bead blasting:
Gimbal ring view 2 after bead blasting:
Gimbal lower pivot arm before bead blasting:
Gimbal lower pivot arm after bead blasting:
Gimbal housing before blasting:
Another view of the gimbal housing before blasting:
Gimbal housing after blasting:
After reading and re-reading GeeBee's post on this forum on painting outdrives, I purchased a quart bottle of Alumiprep and a quart bottle of Alodine from AircraftSpruce.com. After a thorough washing of the parts with hot water and drying with my air hose I applied a 50/50 mixture of Alumiprep and water to the parts to acid wash them. After three minutes I rinsed, rinsed, rinsed and rinsed some more all the parts and again dried them with the air hose.
I then started applying coats of the Alodine solution at full strength with a brush and allowed each coat to dry for a full 6 hours before applying the next coat. I ended up with a total of eight coats of Alodine on all parts before I was satisfied with the results.
Here is the lower unit with the Alodine completed:
The other side of the lower unit with Alodine completed:
I made sure to seal up all holes including threaded bolt holes before the acid wash and Alodine and as you can see from the pictures I used PVC pipe fittings attached with blue RTV to seal up the internal oil gallerys before starting the blasting.
This has been a months long process. I still work full time so I can only work on this after work and on week-ends. I find that after 75 pounds of grit - three blaster loads and about 2 hours of time - I am filthy, hot, tired and discouraged at how slowly everything progresses. After reclaiming all my media (a process of scooping the used media up in my hands, dumping it through a seive into a container, cleaning the seive and then washing down my concrete driveway) I am about beat for the day and call it quits. However, I am really happy with the results so far and since I am on the last piece, the inner transom plate, I am near the end of the dirty part. All that will be left is to get a local auto shop with a paint booth to paint the pieces with the chromate epoxy primer and two top coats of some color of gray to come close to the original VP finish.
I will post more as I progress. Oh, and just because I thought some of the folks who have seen my name for long time now just might have a passing interest, here I am:
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rwilhite |
Edited by - rwilhite on Apr 05 2011 19:14:25 |
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dl2525
USA
407 Posts |
Posted - Apr 16 2011 : 11:55:46
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Looks really good!
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Cam
USA
2687 Posts |
Posted - Apr 17 2011 : 11:34:14
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| Fantastic work and fantastic results. You should hire yourself out!!! |
" If you think nobody cares, try missing a few payments " (author unknown) |
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rwilhite
Carrie 'N On
193 Posts |
Posted - Apr 22 2011 : 06:18:40
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| Well, thanks for the compliments, but I would never agree to do this for someone else. This turned out like many other boat related projects - takes four times longer and is three time more expensive than you anticipated. Next time the outdrive needs repainting, I believe I'll just sell the damned boat. |
rwilhite |
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pvalen
USA
80 Posts |
Posted - Apr 23 2011 : 15:32:31
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| I have a 97 dp-s. Last five years I just clean it up, mask it and spray on antifouling. No problems yet. |
Payne N Diaz |
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LouC
1550 Posts |
Posted - Apr 23 2011 : 16:32:03
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| Salt water and outdrives, what can you say, it's a pain, the only choice is to trailer the boat or buy an outboard! The problem is that the anti fouling paints don't work that well, and you get a lot of growth, and corrosion as well.... |
1988 Four Winns 200 Horizon 4.3 OMC Cobra
1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee 4.0 Selectrac
2007 Jeep Grand Cherokee 5.7 Hemi Quadradrive II |
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GeeBee
21467 Posts |
Posted - Apr 25 2011 : 21:06:36
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Really, really nice job. You will be rewarded with a fine finish, and you will be surprised at how well it wears compared to the factory finish.
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"The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."... Margaret Thatcher
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rwilhite
Carrie 'N On
193 Posts |
Posted - May 04 2011 : 05:27:11
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An update as of May 4, 2011.
I had a hard time finding a car shop that would do the painting on the outdrive, which surprised me a lot. I then had the thought of contacting a motorcycle custom paint shop which I did.
As luck would have it I stumbled across a guy who used to be a painter for SeaRay which has three large manufacturing plants right on Merritt Island. He agreed to do the primer and top coats for $200 labor plus cost of materials and I agreed.
The costs of the primer, additives and paint has skyrocketed and the cost of one quart of primer, the Dethane Ultra additive and the two quarts of top coat paint came to $260. Seems the formulation of almost all this stuff has changed to meet new EPA regulations on VOC's and lead.
Still, everything for under $500 which beats the hell out of the quotes of $4,000 I had received earlier. And I now have a big compressor and the bead blaster too boot.
I dropped the drive components off on Monday and I am supposed to pick the newly painted drive up this Friday. I will post pics of the finished unit then. |
rwilhite |
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Rick D
884 Posts |
Posted - Nov 10 2011 : 14:31:13
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RWilhite,
How did you eventually make out with your drives? I'm considering blasting and painting using the same process but wanted to hear from your experience this past year.
I hand sanded and painted my drives last year... which was extremely labor intensive... and while the paint stayed on just fine, the barnacles did too. Doing it all again is not going to be fun. Now, I am considering the Petit barnacle barrier used by others here but wanted to hear about your experience with the the job you did prior to whatever barrier coat you used.
--Rick
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1997 Larson Cabrio 310 |
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rwilhite
Carrie 'N On
193 Posts |
Posted - Nov 11 2011 : 06:58:28
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I ended up having the paint shop apply a light gray finish coat (2 coats, actually) to the pieces and then re-assembled everything. While the color is not an exact match for the original Volvo finish-which I was unable to discover a paint or color code for after weeks of Internet research-I am very happy with the end results.
I don't have pictures to post right now as I am at work, but will try to post some later from home.
I don't use any kind of barrier coat for growth or barnacles as the boat is usually only in the water for a single day. I trailer the boat so it rarely stays in salt water overnight. However, last year I did have it in warm salt water at Fort Meyers Beach for 15 straight days and did end up with some smaller barnacle growth. For some reason the stainless steel trim tabs seemed to be the worst area for growth and the props had virually no growth at all. To get rid of the barnacles I let the boat sit dry for three weeks and then took my Troy-bilt 2600 PSI pressure washer to it using hot water. That took off the huge majority of the barnacles and left just the calcium "craters" behind. I discovered that applying MaryKate On and Off hull cleaner full strength to those with a sponge and letting it sit for 15 minutes resulted in those calcium shells dissolving away without leaving any kind of discoloration or residue. Right after that is when I started the refinishing project.
I gotta tell you that the bead blasting is the only way to go. No matter how careful you are, you just can't get every nook and cranny with a piece of sandpaper. While the blasting seemed to go real slow at first, I found that by changing my blast media to a 50/50 mixture of 70 grit glass beads and 70 grit aluminum oxide, the blasting went much faster and resulted in a better end result.
The two most important parts of the blating process are making sure your compressor is big enough and that you have a good air drying system to keep all the moisture out of the air feed.
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rwilhite |
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VolvoPenta DPS Refinish Project - Part 1