Steel pilothouse yacht re-paint

[nickj]

Hi all,

I've never owned a steel boat before, and I'm curious to understand how to best keep her bristol shape. The topsides were sprayed in Awlgrip around 10 years ago, and it's holding up nicely. Below the waterline will require a sodablast and epoxy on her next haul out - the deck and pilothouse paint is likely 20+ years.

With this in mind, I'm wondering if any long term steel boat owners might be able to chime in on what might be considered the current and best way to re-spray the decks in particular. I assume that to do this properly, all the deck hardware needs to be removed? This alone seems like an insanely large job. Then the entire deck is sand/sodablasted back to raw steel, then faired as required, primed & two-pack sprayed. To be done professionally, on a 42ft boat would one expect to be forking out north of $20k?

I've been researching around the place looking at the kinds of finishes people are achieving, and it seems without doubt the Dutch steelworkers can not only can shape the nicest of lines in steel, but they also really know how to fair, spray and finish boats... I suppose they have a good century of steel boatbuilding culture up their sleeves with all those barges and waterways...

[boden36]

Unless the paint scheme is really failing badly and there is a lot of corrosion evident, it should not be necessary to blast the whole thing to bare metal.
With isolated failures, you should be able to spot blast the rusty bits to white metal and just very lightly whip blast the sound paint to achieve a keyed surface for repainting.
I have recently done this using a 10 gallon blast pot, 30/60 garnet, and two air compressors linked together to give me a steady pressure at the pot of around 90 psi. Worked well.