Notice:
The advice given on this site is based upon individual or quoted experience, yours may differ.
The Officers, Staff and members of this site only provide information based upon the concept that anyone utilizing this information does so at their own risk and holds harmless all contributors to this site.
Starting to feel like if we do everything we want with this boat this year we'll never go sailing :)
Currently, the keel is mostly scraped down to metal, but still attached to the boat. There's really not much pitting on this old hunk of iron, surprisingly..
Paint we were able to get off was just an hour or so with a scraper - big stuff. I can't imagine it was doing much to keep the water off the iron.
To finish correctly with any kind of paint I'd want to bring it down to "shiny" iron and then begin the finish from there. But, what's a good stop-gap if we don't get around to this this year?
Just throw a quick coat of primer + ablative until we're ready to refinish correctly?
Also, do the zincs do anything on these iron keels? Maintenance guys at my marina say they're pointless... but we do have a zinc on the keel now.
I used Rustoleum rust binding or preventing primer on the iron swing keel of my last boat before finishing with a Rustoleum top coat with excellent results in freshwater. It contains zinc phosphate, AKA cold galvanizing, and I highly recommend it. I also use zincs because of the mix of iron, stainless, and bronze in the keel assembly. Fresh, brackish, or mixed water "zincs" are actually aluminum or magnesium alloys since they need to be more reactive than zinc.
edit: sand the keel bare under the zincs and seal the outer edge
Dave B. aboard Pearl 1982 TR/SK/Trad. #3399 Lake Erie/Florida Panhandle
Notice: The advice given on this site is based upon individual or quoted experience, yours may differ. The Officers, Staff and members of this site only provide information based upon the concept that anyone utilizing this information does so at their own risk and holds harmless all contributors to this site.