Full Blown Fuelishness : A Place to Start

Where do you start on a project this size ?

After several conversations with Suzanne we decided to prep the shop for cold weather first, that would include adding a couple of furnaces and much better lighting.
While completing the heat and light project in the warehouse I made a copy of the
"To Do List" and began to get bids on work I was going to sub out. Once I got all of my prices , I decided that doing the outside of the boat was a great place to start as the outside project includes some of my labor as well as work from subs.
Before I say anymore I want to make it clear that all the subs that I used had no idea that I was going to write this blog or that it would be linked to RiverBill's site. I want everyone to know exactly how I was treated and the quality of work I got. I hope that this information helps all of you when you need to hire subs for similar things on your boats.

I selected Lehman Conley from Fiberglass by Lehman to do all the gel coat work and remove all the oxidization from the exterior of the boat. In order to save some money I agreed to prep the boat by removing the stripes, hardware, snaps and covering the interior with plastic. I felt that buffing out all the stainless steel trim and rails now would be better than cleaning the buffing mess off the fresh gel coat.

I spent the next several days with an air eraser getting the stripes off, actually went through 6 eraser wheels to get the job done. I've owned the boat since 2004 and always thought that all the stripes were vinyl , 5 minutes with the air eraser would prove that assumption wrong. Seems the wide black stripe is painted on with a polyurethane of some kind. I was kind of looking forward to seeing the boat without the stripes so I could decide what was going back on if anything . Suzanne and I had spoke of possible color changes in the beginning but with the black stripe being permanent it looks like its back to the original style. This is no real crime because I liked the original stuff enough to buy the boat in the first place.

With the stripes removed and interior covered now is a good time to do the stainless trim. My first try was with a 3" air buffer, the trim shined pretty good but the mess on the boat was really bad, I switched to a full size buffer and the results on the trim were much better, but the mess increased as well. Taping and papering around all the trim was the only answer.