Inside the tent - it's time to scrape

It's been a few years since I last had the tent up, and part of the foundation has rotted away. So I had to make a new one. Also, after the tent blew over during the storm Allan in 2013, I made it 40 cm. lower, therefore the elastics at the bottom of the sides had to be moved. It all went smoothly, it took a day and a half to get everything put together.

I must admit that it is not a moment too soon to get something done about the varnish, last winter has been very hard, there is a lot more damage than I had expected. The vertical surfaces look fine, except for the bleaching, but the horizontal surfaces look horrible, and especially along the joints and in some of the

corners there are a lot of peeling and moisture under the varnish. Unbelievable what a single wet winter can do to a boat. I hope the picture will serve as a warning…

Scraping the paint off is not that bad, it actually goes pretty fast - it took me 3 days with a heat gun and a scraper to remove all the varnish. A piece of good advice: Don't use a carbide scraper, they are not sharp enough unless you replace the blade every 10 minutes. Use an old-fashioned scraper and have a file at hand to keep it sharp - and while you're at it with the sharp scraper, remove the 0,5 mm sunbleached mahogany. Scrape until the

color looks right. This will save you from numerous hours of sanding. It's much easier than sanding it off, especially in the corners.

When I tell people that all the paint needs to come off, their reaction is most often to say that they think it is a huge task, and then when I say that it's actually quite fast and easy, they have a hard time believing it. Therefore, I have made a small video that shows how I use a heat gun and scraper. The same method can of course also be used for removing paint.

The video can be seen on Selma III's new YouTube channel, where I from time to time will upload videos - you can watch it by clicking on the picture or on YouTube here.