While almost done with my overhaul, I have been saving the worst for last- bottom paint. I hate bottom paint time, anything that has anything to do with it and since I am just a poor blue collar working stiff it means I have to do it myself. That means- blue or black boogers, blue or black dust in every orafice on my body. Taste of bottom paint in my mouth. Bottom paint dust over all my tools, getting the picture??? Hope so- anyway here are a couple of things that have helped me to deal with cleaning the bottom and not being quite so miserable but really I am. First thing I am going to show you is a tool I made/ designed to make it much easier to clean your inboard shafts with. All it is is a punch basically with half of it cut off and I attach it to a section of old outrigger-



You size the punch just slightly over your shaft size- i.e.- my shaft is 1.25" diameter so I use a 1 5/16" punch. This way it slides down the shaft easily.Slowly rotate the shaft and this rig makes quick work of barnacles and seagrowth. Come back with a real fine emory cloth/sandpaper and finish the job. Last thing I do is coat the shaft with collonites insulator/or fleet wax. several coats, and do not remove. This will help keep the sealife from growing quite so fast. (good stuff).
Position the punch on the end of your tube/section of outrigger works great because after you attach the punch you can bend the upper part of it to make it "ergonomically friendly" and give you the perfect angle for your particular application. (large sportfisher on railway might need a little different angle than my boat on a trailer/jack stands in the yard)
All I do is take a couple of hose clamps and tighten them down and then secure with duck tape as in the picture- not real pretty but it gets the job done

Next for scraping or old paint wire brushing/prep for new paint I borrowed a method we use for certain things at work which is nothing more than attaching the rig I made to a vaccuum cleaner/shop vac. My "Rig",lol has either a paint scraper on one end and a wire brush on the other. Also interchangable with the shaft cleaner above. Probably a lot of other "better" ways to rig it, (probably already in use but I have never seen anyone using this method). Its ugly, it works and keeps a lot of that bottom paint "dust " into the vac while you are cleaning and out of my lungs. this also does not take the place of standard safety equipment, respirators etc). It eally does work pretty good, so if you are one who does this kind of work to your boat try this stuff out, It wont make the task any more desirerable to do, but it makes it less "nasty". Heres a pic of my vac rig. (the old lady just shakes her head and walks away while saying something about being "King of the jury riggers",lol.



note the angle of the pole for the ergonomics,lol






hope this makes the job a little easier for some of you guys- peace-craig