How does the color Black stand up???

[92GTA]

Interlux Brightside Marine Paint.

At first I was going to go with dark green for the boot stripe, gunwale, and various other trim pieces. I've decided very much that I would like to instead use black, I feel it will look much better in contrast to the white hull and all of the varnished wood, also the red bottom paint and portions of the deck that I paint white with sand for grip.

My concern is how well this brand of black paint hold up to UV light. The boat will be in fresh water year round but I don't want the black looking like crap after a couple months.

Is anyone here using black who can comment on how it will look?

[paladin]

not knowing anything about your boat....I would say that it has much to do with the preparation putting it on. The primer must be compatable with minimum imperfections in the finish or everything will show in the high gloss black paint, and every blemish will be readily noted...at every angle..

[Nanoose]

We're using black as you are specifying, but not interlux (a locally produced marine high gloss enamel), and it is standing up very well. No fading, no nothin'. It's been on a year, and there was a lot of sun/heat here this summer (more than normal...global warming, you know).

[Tom Lathrop]

If your question is: How does black paint withstand the elements of sun and weather compared to other colors, then one answer is that black is the most resistant of all colors to sun degradation. I am not as certain about its resistance to water, salt and temperature but I think its pretty good there also.

[Todd Bradshaw]

Black will stand up to UV about as well or better than anything else you'll find. We had a wide, black Brightside bootstripe on our trimaran and black Hydrocoat bottom paint below that and kept the boat moored in fresh water. The Brightside needs to be above the moored waterline as it will peel if left submerged. It will, in time, pick up some whitish hard-water deposits. If you leave it all season, it's a real bear to get them off, if you even can. Toilet bowl cleaner will usually do it, but will eat into some bottom paints so it's tough to just clean the bootstripe without the stuff running down on the bottom. Instead, we found that pulling the boat into the shallows once a month and going over the Brightside with a sponge and vinegar would take them off before they got too bad and keep it looking fine as long as you did it on a regular basis. Vinegar also proved to be better at end of season clean-up than most of the fancy cleaners we tried (makes your boat smell like a really big pickle for a few hours).

The same thing happens with dark green, so whether you use black, green, navy or any other dark color for the stripe, the deposits are going to show if you don't clean the painted area at regular intervals.

[92GTA]

Sweet, thanks! I'll be going with the black then. I was worried about it looking like it has the effect a shower door gets on the inside you know, it's hard to explain but that's what I saw in my mind when I thought about the black.

Thanks for the feedback!

EDIT: While we are on the topic, when I make my canvas exterior covers and stuff, what's a good black dye for use on canvas?

[Bruce Hooke]

Since the whole point of a canvas cover is sun protection I'd think twice about using black for the canvas cover because it will result in MUCH more heat build up under the canvas.

That said, I suppose in some ways I am showing a bias in what I think of as important. Both black paint and black canvas will cause the surface to get much hotter, which is a bit hard on the finish and the wood. I can see painting parts of a boat black because it looks so beautiful, but the canvas cover used to cover stuff when you are not using the boat does not seem as important to me.

If you do want black canvas you should be able to buy it already dyed, and a commercial dying job is likely to hold up better than anything you'd be likely to do at home. Of course black canvas will probably degrade (and fade) faster than white canvas because of the heat build-up.

[92GTA]

Here's the deal on the canvas. I have a friend in the USN that got me an entire roll of military grade canvas. It's already camouflage green and enough to do 3 30' cabin cruisers I'm sure.

That said I planned on making all of the needed covers myself. I was actually planning on double layering it as well. It was going to be easy to simply dye the canvas a darker shade green I thought. Obviously this color won't look good with the black. I already planned on tinting all the cabin glass and only leaving the windsheild to the helm plain glass, or maybe a tiny amount of tints. Honestly, when the weather is good the boat will be getting used every weekend or more, it's on a 2500ft altitude lake where it snows sometime so heat from the black I don't think is too much of an issue.

The black paint I use on the boat will be very minimal, very. Only on the bootstripe, gunwale, and choice pieces of trim. The deck will be painted white with sand in between coats, and the rest of the exterior above the deck will all be varnished.

[Bruce Hooke]

Is it really cotton canvas or is it some sort of synthetic along the lines of Sunbrella? If it really is canvas then there is at least a chance that you may be able to dye it black. If it is synthetic then getting any dye to take to it is going to be much harder.

[Bruce Hooke]

Honestly, when the weather is good the boat will be getting used every weekend or more...

That, of course, still means that something like 5 days a week the boat will not be getting used. If it is in a boat house during that time then off course all of this is moot because it will be out of the sun anyway. In any case, since it sounds like it does not get that hot where you are maybe black is less of a concern. I have no idea what the climate is like in your area -- around here it snows a good bit in the winter but it also tops 90 in the summer reasonably regularly. I know from experience that even on what seems like a relatively cool day a black surface can get quite toasty.

It does partly depend on what the canvas is covering. At one extreme, if it is over relatively heat insensative materials like metal objects, or if it is inside a cabin where there is more protection from the sun, then it matters a lot less. At the other extreme, if, say, you are trying to protect a hatch out on the foredeck made up of varnished, solid wood boards, edge jointed to each other then I would be much more cautious. Heat up a hatch like that regularly and you are asking for cracks to open up between the boards. Ditto for more heat sensative things like electronics.

[Nanoose]

Is it really cotton canvas or is it some sort of synthetic along the lines of Sunbrella? If it really is canvas then there is at least a chance that you may be able to dye it black. If it is synthetic then getting any dye to take to it is going to be much harder.

Besides the dyability issue, cotton won't hold up to the elements well at all. Rather than doubling the canvas work, do a single layer and save the rest of the roll, knowing you'll need to redo it in a shorter period of time compared to an acrylic fibre cloth.

The cotton will dye, but won't hold the color well, and again, will rot pretty fast.

[Todd Bradshaw]

As logical as it may seem, my experience both building and using covers doesn't indicate that black ones get any hotter than most of the other colors. Our trimaran had a cockpit cover that was about 8'x10'. The first one I built for it was from yellow Sunbrella, because I had a roll of it sitting around. About two years later, it looked like crap because it had picked up so much dirt and had faded a little and just generally gotten rather nasty looking. Being in the cover business, having my own boat cover look scruffy isn't very good advertising, so I built a new one. This one was from black Sunbrella. When we would uncover the boat, I can't say that I ever noticed any big difference in the interior temperature and the black cover looked a heck of a lot cleaner for a heck of a lot longer than the yellow one did. It was already about five years old when we sold the boat and still looked great. My Starboat had a full Sunbrella cover made from a dark burgundy tweed called "Black Cherry" and our Nordica had one made from Hemlock Tweed (dark green). On a sunny day, it seems to get just as hot inside those colors and I don't think the typical "Pacific Blue" is much different. The light shades may be a bit cooler, but they pick up dirt much faster. They'll look horrible long before they wear out or deteriorate from the sun.

As to using dye to color a big hunk of surplus canvas, your chances of making anything other than a mess aren't at all good. The dyes you can get and the facilities that you will have available for doing a big piece won't cut it. By the end of it's first season, you'll be quite lucky if your cover and everything it's touched aren't a lovely shade of dirty grey. Chances are that surplus camp canvas has already been treated with compounds to repel water and prevent mildew. I doubt the army buys anything that isn't treated or even has a place where they could store it without it mildewing. These treatments would need to be removed (difficult, at best)before you could ever expect dye to really hold or go on evenly. The anti-mildew treatments are usually arsenic compounds, so you also would want to be pretty careful if you're trying to wash them off or standing over a big vat of hot water with arsenic-laden steam coming off of it.

Though it may be a nice idea to use a bunch of surplus canvas, dye it black and make a boat cover, in reality it's not a practical plan, or one that has much chance of ever generating a decent or good-looking cover. Combine that with the fact that building a high-quality boat cover is a fair amount of work. Cotton canvas, even the good stuff like Vivatex, has a life span that's so much shorter than acrylic canvas that it may not be worth putting all that labor into it. Then there's the weight of it, especially when wet, the bulk, the shrinkage, the smell etc. Canvas boat covers disappeared from the market for a very good reason. And double-layering a boat cover from any material is just begging for a serious mold problem, both inside the layers of the cover and in the boat. No Way, no-how!

[92GTA]

Wow, needless to say I just leaned a TON from this thread, lol.

I believe, in light of what has been mentioned, I will be leaving the surplus canvas material alone and simply making a "works-for-now", single layer, window covering out of it for the cabin windows and to close off the cockpit. Then at a later time as budget permits, I'll find someone local who can make correct custom covers for my boat in the color I want and a material that is recommended for my purpose.

Thanks for all the info and opinions guys!

Alex

[Mike Keers]

As long as we're talking the color black, I have a friend who expressed curiosity about having black sails being made--while not my thing, has anyone seen or heard of black sails? Comments?

[Nanoose]

Ya...it was a black tarp!, on a pirate boat! Seriously!!!

[Todd Bradshaw]

I built a solid black mainsail for my iceboat. A few years ago somebody at Bainbridge made a roll of 9 oz. Dacron in black for a custom order and they had some on their close-out list, so I bought it. The standard 3.9 oz. Dacron for dinghy sails is readily available in black. I used it for parts of the radial I built for our Sunfish and it's pretty cool.

You can sometimes also find a heavier weight of Dacron (about 5.3 oz. - like a Hobie Cat sail) in black, but you may have to hunt a bit.

[Mike Keers]

Thanx guys. I've forwarded the thread to my friend. He was talking about painting the boat he's building black--a Bolger 'Old Shoe', so that's why the thread caught my attention. Then he mentioned black sails...so thought I'd ask. Todd, I have to say the Sunfish sail is striking and looks good. Personally I'm not a fan of black, especially living here in Aridzonah, where things can get astoundingly hot in the sun. Youch! I think a black 'Shoe' with tanbark sails might look OK, but black sails too might be overkill. But it ain't my boat! He's thinking of naming it 'Pearl'. Get it?

[Todd Bradshaw]

Black sails can actually be considered one of the traditional colors, even if they weren't very common. Tanbark wasn't the only color produced by the old preservative treatments. Different chemical mixes would stain the canvas various colors - blue, green, red, orange, black, yellow. They generally wouldn't have been quite as even, bright and vibrant as modern Dacron colors, but you can put colored sails on a traditional boat and make a reasonable case to justify the look as long as you avoid beach-cat-style multi-striping. I thought those Coast Gold sails on FCHanke's Whilly Boat, in the photos he posted a few days ago, looked outstanding and the choice of that color is just as appropriate as Tanbark would have been.

One of the frustrating things about being a sailmaker is that within 10-20 years maximum, just about anything you build is either gone or getting pretty tired looking and needing replacement. The up side is that from anything over 50-75 feet away, the work we do has a bigger impact on how good a boat looks than most of the work that was done on the hull. A good profile and a good looking set of sails show up long before anybody can see any woodgrain or fancy trim. I enjoy it when boat owners decide to go off the beaten path with sail colors and panel layouts. I haven't built a plain white sail in ten years or more and don't plan to do so anytime soon.

[Thorne]

Dark canvas can stop UV and other radiation/heat from penetrating better than white, so if you leave decent ventilation under the cover, it may work just fine.

As for your friend, I certainly hope he doesn't ever plan to be out at dawn or dusk -- with a black hull and black sails, he'll need a very bright masthead light to keep from being hit by powerboats or even other sailboats...

Here's an old shoe -

[TomF]

IIRC, Tom Colvin suggested black for the topsides of the pinky that illustrates his Steel Boatbuilding book. Obviously, he's not worried about overheating wood planks, potentially making them spew their caulking.

Colvin's rationale was that black would camoflauge some of the creosote etc. that might get onto the topsides from the pilings of commercial wharves etc. But he also strongly advocated a pure white for decks - both for coolness underfoot (and in the cabin), and for ease of working on the decks at night, with little light.

[Mike Keers]

I might just be making this up (false memories and all that stuff) but isn't the reason many of the old ships--square-riggers and such--were black-hulled was because the topsides were treated with creosote-tar type preservatives? I mean I didn't think they actually painted them black because they liked the color?

[donald branscom]

I might just be making this up (false memories and all that stuff) but isn't the reason many of the old ships--square-riggers and such--were black-hulled was because the topsides were treated with creosote-tar type preservatives? I mean I didn't think they actually painted them black because they liked the color?

Many wood boats use to cover the decks with tar also. Sometimes it was several inches thick, Read about this at Fort Mason library, San Francisco if you are in the area. in regards to the first passenger ship on the California coast, The Wapama. I think the major reason that boat owners very rarely use black as a color for sail covers is that bird excrement shows up so well.
But if you leave your boat in the marina and only see it in the summer
you probably don't know that. If you really want to know about some of these things ask a live aboard sailor or an anchor out boater.
Also light grey sail covers are very good because grey doesn't show bird poop, it doesnt get too hot and cause mold if some moisture is left on the sails when they are put away. Also black for sail covers is putting a heavy color up high on the boat and it looks better if heavy colors are on the bottom. At night a light colored sail color can be seen at night .
Many boat owners also don't put lizards on their halyards and so the halyard bangs around all winter. Then in the summer they come down to see their boat and see little screws and other stuff from the rigging are laying on the deck. Roller furlers coming undone etc.,. just thank a live aboard for rescueing the roller furler before it self destructs.
Just one of my pet peeves. l