Ryan Amato Painting ryanamatopainting.com

Whatever Floats Your Boat…
Painting the hull of a 48-ton craft

Painters squeezed in some hard to access work areas.

Josiah White is known to history as an early Pennsylvania industrialist who was instrumental in, among many things, boat and barge shipping and construction as well as water transport, so it makes sense that there’s a vessel named after him that still travels up and down the Lehigh, Pennsylvania Canal.

Built in 1993, the hull of the Josiah White II was the last steel hull manufactured at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point plant. The boat is located at the National Canal Museum in Hugh Moore Park in Easton, Pennsylvania, It seats 100 and offers on-board dining and some spectacular views of Lehigh Valley. It’s Pennsylvania's only mule-drawn canal boat ride

Amato Painting was chosen to restore the paint job on the 48 ton craft, which as a steel structure, needs continuous maintenance. “With any steel, proper preparation and coatings are very important. Otherwise rust and deterioration will enter and can eat right through the steel, requiring much more costly repairs or replacement,” noted company owner Ryan Amato.

The team had to coordinate with the client as to when the canal could be drained so that the vessel could be stationed on concrete blocks for painting. You can imagine that a boat that can seat and feed 100 people is a pretty good size, so once the canal was drained the crew had to remove a large amount of mud using shovels and pressure washers to access the bottom of it.

They used grinders to prep the rough surfaces for epoxy. “We used the Rust-Oleum 9100 DTM Epoxy Mastic as a primer and implemented the Rust-Oleum 9800 DTM Urethane Mastic as the top coat for a great coatings system,” said Amato. After that they had to coordinate refilling the canal so they could move the boat yet one more time to tackle the spots that were touching the concrete it sad on the first time. Once the boat was repositioned, the canal was drained again so the crew could access the remaining small portions in the cramped spacesunderneath. From there, they painted the interior, which was very likely less … draining!

The canal had to be drained more than once to make sure all areas of this boat could be painted.   The canal had to be drained more than once to make sure all areas of this boat could be painted. Painters squeezed in some hard to access work areas.

Key Products

• Rust-Oleum 9100 DTM
• Rust-Oleum 9800 DTM