Project Cállate: Next Stop Paint Booth

Well one thing’s for sure, the 2005 368 Skater Powerboats catamaran— Project Cállate—looks nothing like its original self since the crew at E-Ticket Performance Boats in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., spent hundreds of hours over the past few weeks sanding the boat and getting it ready to be primered, taped and moved into the paint booth.

The paint design for Cállate, a 2005 Skater 368, was handled by 1926 Studio in Southern California’s Orange County.

According to Brad Stewart, the owner of E-Ticket, the boat has been primered, the taping will begin this week and the actual paint job should take several weeks to complete.

“We haven’t been doing too much exciting stuff, just sanded our butts off,” Stewart said. “We got the final primer on it last week, put some final passes on it and are getting ready to start taping. For a while it looked the same every day because the sanding is such a process—this boat has a lot of surface area.”

Stewart, who sounds excited to paint the 36-foot cat, said that he’s learned a lot since taking on the renovation.

“Every time you do one of these projects it teaches you something,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot about epoxy—we don’t do a lot of epoxy stuff (in Lake Havasu). It just takes such a long time to work with.”

The owner of the Skater, Larry Guillen of Southern California, said he can’t wait to see how the graphics, which were designed by Justin Sutton at Orange County’s 1926 Studio, turn out.

While the boat is in paint, its engines—a pair of Sterling Performance power plants—are currently being tuned and the interior is beginning to take shape.

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