The Effect of Feathering on Coating Performance

From JPCL, June 2019

By Patrick Cassidy and Michael Kibler, Elzly Technology Corporation; and Cameron Miller, Paul Slebodnick and James Martin, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Feedback from waterfront personnel performing maintenance painting for the U.S. Navy has consistently questioned the Navy’s requirement for performing feathering. NAVSEA Standard Item (NSI) 009-32 defines feathering as tapering the edges of tightly adhering old paint at an approximate 30-degree angle into the newly prepared bare metal surface. This article describes a U.S. Naval Research Laboratory program designed to test the hypothesis that feathering does not affect repair coating system performance and discusses what this testing revealed....