: Paul, assuming you're not asking a rhetorical question, the dye
: fascination is a product of using "Corey's Goop," aka
: spiritline something or other, as a skin coating. Apparently it
: is not readily tinted, so one must color the skin first. paint
: does not adhere to it. It's a pretty popular skin coating for
: nylon, as it is fairly flexible and tough. It is also expensive
: and fiddly to apply correctly.

By no means a rhetorical question, or a sarcastic one. Thanks for your answer.

I just read the site, and his take in coloring is similar to mine. He wants to dye the fabric, not paint it first with a design, as the waterproofing urethane coating is blocked from wetting out fabric which is covered with large areas of paint. For overall coloring, though, he suggests mixing the pigment, or colorant, into the part "B" of the urethane mix (before mixing it with the part "A").

: Personally, I have no desire ever to skin a boat with this again,
: despite the convenience. I really, really prefer to have a taut,
: wrinkle free skin on my boats, which is often hard or impossible
: to achieve with the PVC on some hull shapes. It just does not
: stretch or shrink.

Try stretching it when it is very warm. It is a thermoplastic and it should stretch easaily when it gets close to its melting point. Once it cools to room temperature it should be just as tough to stretch as it was before.

Other thought is to use darts, a tailoring trick for getting flat cloth to fit around round bodies, and even to fit very well around bodies with some fancy curves. The builders of birchbark canoes employed darts to get that stiff bark to flow into a smoother curve. They cut out an area of the bark, pulled the edges together with twine made from twisted spruce roots, and waterproofed the seam with some cooked-down spruce pitch, applied hot. The same technique should be easier with PVC coated fabric. We have scissors to cut with, and a great glue to reseal things with.

: Other than that, I have no issues with it, and it certainly is
: easier to skin a boat that way.

Somehow the classic phrase: "There is more than one way to skin a catamaran" needed to be trimmed and an unknown editor shortened the last word to "cat"--which has been the consternation of felines ever since. :)

PGJ