Stem to Stern: Art of the Brush

This month, as I look across the service yard, I gaze upon two huge, white, shrink-wrap tents over on the south rail. The tents are temporary structures for spray painting. With an involuntary shake of my head, I recall the days when all of our paint work was brush-applied, and our paint crew was the best in the business at slinging that old 99. It was a much simpler process than atomization and one that required far less labor and material. No bagging off, no multiple entire sleeves of masking tape, no roll upon roll of Visqueen and green paper. No three-step priming process with various atomized epoxy fillers. No fear of compressed air contaminants requiring large, screw-type compressors, filters and driers. No opportunistic neighbors demanding that we pay to have their parked cars painted because we somehow over-sprayed them on a freak wind, and no $30,000 temporary expendable structure. Painting boats, like most everything in modern life, has become labor intensive and inefficient while inundating the landfills with disposables.

Much of what made our old yard a cut above the rest was plain old good luck. We were lucky to have been blessed with a blank canvas from the Almighty for creativity and innovation and, equally important, lucky to have access to exceptional human resources as well. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, hard-working blue-collar men, coming out of two wars, hired on at the yard with skills acquired in the service of their country. Another wave of great men with exceptional skills arrived at the yard in the late fifties and early sixties, driven here in exile by a ruthless, socialist revolutionary in Cuba. Our paint crew was made up of a talented bunch of diligent souls who were led by my perfectionist uncle, Tommy Rybovich. Men like Jimmy Becker, Gormy Covar, Leonard Bortner, Marshal Bourland, Ignacio Leon, Raul Castillo and Rolando Muños. These men took their orders from an ex-B-17 bomber pilot, turning out excellence following a daily morning meeting for assignment, conducted like a pre-flight mission briefing in front of the paint shop. The orders were clear and concise, and ended without debate with a “Let’s get to work,” and a “Yes, sir.” Custom colors were mixed by Tommy from his formulas, scrawled by hand on a legal pad, hanging over the vats of mineral spirits. Try that part about ending without debate today: “My weather app says we shouldn’t paint today because it’s going to rain somewhere in the solar system.” “Is there a YouTube video that shows how to clean my gun?” “I’m using too much data. What’s the yard WiFi password again?” “Can I work from home?”

In analog days, a boat was hauled, jitterbugged outside, blown-off and cross-hauled into the clean sheds. Paint was applied with a brush, a paint brush—see Wikipedia, and not mixed with compressed air, sending half of it into the O-zone. All of the paint went on the boat with no mass consumption of extravagant throw-away materials. The hull sides had a ¾-inch tape line at the sheer guard and one at the boot. There were two men per side, one high, one low. You could start at the bow and do one side at a time if she had a stem-iron, or start at the stern and come around a painted stem. Brush back into your paint and maintain a wet edge. Most boats had a boot line scribed into the hull which made for easy taping or cutting. On new boats, we marked the boot with a string, stretched over two horses, and scribed the line in with a batten and a marking gauge. When it came time for bottom paint, we cut the line in on the lower scribe with a brush. If my old mentor Marshall Ray caught you taping a boot for bottom paint, you would never hear the end of it.

The marine enamels of choice in those days were good for 1 to 2 years in the Florida sun. That meant that most of our customers would be in, once every 1 to 2 years, on a staggered schedule for paint. The frequency of this disassembly and re-assembly allowed for discovery of problems before they became real issues. The large volume of paint work in the yard was accommodated by far less labor and material in each job. The process was relatively quick. Hardware was removed and re-installed, after painting with Dolfinite (white, natural and mahogany), so it could be taken apart again. All fastening was done with heavy chrome brass slotted screws. Each 10 x 1¼ oval head slot was lined up on her guards. There were no cheap-ass, Globalist, Chinese stainless, Phillips head screws that need to be electro-polished and passivated and still bleed rust down the side of a new paint job, even though they were ordered in 316. Tef-gel? It didn’t exist and we didn’t need it. With the industry conversion to spray-applied urethanes, the re-paint schedule has been stretched to five years and significantly beyond that with acrylics and polish. The average paint job has increased from $100 per foot in brushed enamel to $1,500 per foot in spray-applied urethane. The long intervals now between paint jobs are a breeding ground for corrosion, leaks and general deterioration. Out of sight = out of mind = out of pocket.

Our first spray-applied linear polyurethane paint job was in 1975, three years after the untimely demise of my Uncle Tommy. Initially, we played with Awlgrip, which was originally marketed as Alumagrip, a product that had established a stellar reputation for longevity in the aircraft industry. There was a lot of preparation involved, including major modifications to the sheds with multiple filter panels, explosion-proof lighting, and huge down-draft blowers which blew into water trays in my grandmother’s side yard. Dad had a 36-foot Hatteras convertible at the time and volunteered his boat as the lab rat. Jimmy and Arty got the first shot at the gun and suited-up in paint suits, spray socks and respirators. Holding their guns and hoses as they approached the shed, it looked to the rest of us like a scene from a NASA pre-launch. The first and second shots were practice runs. Getting familiar with the gun, the product and the primers took some time and we learned where the pitfalls were on that little Hatteras. Jimmy and Arty nailed the third hull shot several days later. Employees, customers and boat crew anxiously peeked into the shed at the end of the day to see the “new stuff.” Good God Almighty, the smooth surface and the reflective high-gloss were incredible! In no time, the word was out, and everyone wanted their boat to be painted with Awlgrip. Painting a boat had now become a complex, expensive operation. Paint jobs took three times as long to complete, the yard schedule became impossible to maintain, and customers began to go elsewhere. It was the end of the innocence for our paint crew and the end of oil-based enamels.

Over time, we experimented with other linear and acrylic urethanes including Sterling, Imron, Jet Glow, Acri-Glow, Awl-Craft, Alexseal and others. It’s funny how the introduction of a new product in the industry is always met with great fanfare and an assurance that it is better than anything before. Customers and captains insist that we use the new “Poly-Raz-Ma-Taz” because Smith and Jones’s boatyard is using it. Be careful. The truth is, we all use what works best for us and our customers. Simplicity and consistency are still the foundation of great work. We, like anyone else, have our favorites and have been burned more than once by the latest and the greatest. If we tell you something is a problem, it’s because we’ve tried it and … it’s a problem. With spray-applied paint, each time a man picks up the gun, he faces the possibility of contamination, negative atmospheric influences, equipment malfunction, product failure and human error. My first attempt with the gun resulted in multiple sags down both sides of a new hull. Upon inspection, our lead spray man at the time, Dave Lioce, bestowed upon me the name “Sag Boy from Saginaw” …Very funny, Dave. Minimizing the potential for each of these undesirable results is a full-time job we take very seriously. One doesn’t just grab a brush and sling paint anymore. Those days are long gone.

Waxing nostalgic won’t get us back to those simpler times. Spray painting is here to stay, even in residential construction. You couldn’t hire a qualified, large area brush man today if your life depended on it. Fortunately, we have a first-class spray crew here along with several senior citizen brush men who are handing the torch of a lost art to family and two eager young ladies. Bernard, Clarke, Fred and their band of misfits consistently turn out excellence with the brush and gun and, like our old enamel crew, make us look like we know what we’re doing. They work hard, give a damn, and having them here is nothing but that plain old good luck. The “Sag Boy from Saginaw” counts his blessings everyday.

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This article originally appeared in the December 2023 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/blogs/stem-to-stern-art-of-the-brush