Hi,
Can someone give me some ideas here? I have a hand-me-down row boat. Aluminum, has a couple colors of paint on it with the last color being green. You can see in the picture that most of the paint has flaked off.
The wood for the benches is weak, rotted. I think there was some styrofoam under the benches but most is gone.
Rivets are not the best but it doesn't leak.
I'd like to not put a lot of money in it as it sits in the woods and is my pond-maintenance vessel for checking on the aerator or any future jobs where I might need to be in the middle of the pond.
I'm fine with going back to bare aluminum. Is there a spray-on or brush-on paint stripper that won't etch the paint? Would sand blasting leave the aluminum surface scratched or blotchy?
For the benches I could try to find some remnant or warped composite lumber from a local big box store or maybe someone has an idea of some way to recycle some plastic and use that for seats?
Here is a picture I found that shows the outside and the inside of the boat. Most of the paint is gone on the inside, the outside and especially the bottom of the boat have big hunks of various color of paint in various stages of flaking off.
