METSTRADE: Recharging boats’ coating with Hempel’s Infinity
At last week’s METSTRADE, Hempel launched its latest product Infinity, a water-based, biocide-free performance recharger that renews existing silicone paint.
“It’s a radical new innovation which works together with our Silic One system,” Thomas Olsen Hempel’s marketing director, yacht, told MIN. “I am super excited. This is the biggest thing I have seen in all the time I have been working with boats – about 40 years. It’s super cool.”
Olsen’s enthusiasm about the product is palpable.
“Hempel’s Silic One system has been on the market for 12 years.” That’s a a biocide free, high solid, fouling release coating. “What we’re doing now is actually a recharger for the system. So instead of repainting your boat every second year, if you have the Silic One system on, you can use Infinity. Basically you apply it on top of your Silic One system, let it dry for 24 hours, hose it down and you launch the boat again. And that’s it. No sanding, no painting, no masking off at the water line. You don’t build up any paint layers. It’s extremely quick, so a 30-foot boat would take you half an hour.
“You can use a wide brush and then you just slap it on – you can paint ugly if you want. You just need to get it on there. You don’t need to worry about finish because you’re washing off the top layer anyway. It’ll look like the original paint when you are done.
“What we are doing here is actually adding a new hydro-gel into the system. It’s just like recharging a battery.”
Simply put, Infinity prolongs painting-free time for an extra season, every season, enabling boat owners to spend more time sailing and less time painting.
“It’s interesting as its a product that’s so radically new and taking a lot of the pain points away,” says Olsen. “A lot of the products that usually come out of the coatings industry are small scale advances that move us forward, but we have something here now which is radically looking at it from the boat owner’s perspective, making their lives easier. We want people out sailing. We don’t want them standing around fixing boats.”
Olsen explains that Infinity has come out of other developments. “At Hempel we believe the future of yachting needs to be more sustainable so it’s part of our biocide free strategy and that’s where we are putting all our efforts and ideas – into these systems,” he says.
Sustainable products need to actually work, but Olsen says until now “many of the sustainable products, the ones that work, have been traditionally a little more difficult to apply. But this product is water based so it doesn’t matter if it’s [the air’s] damp. As long as it’s more than five degrees, you’re good to go.”
Hempel’s Infinity will be available in 2.4-litre size and is suitable for both DIY and Pro usage in the EU, with North America to follow. Thus, says Olsen, his objective for 2025 is getting this product rolled out, and seeing more people converting to Silic One.
The cost will be comparable to the Silic One system (product data is on the company’s website), but as Olsen says: “You save a tonne of work hours and a lot of hassle.”
In May this year, MIN reported that Luxembourg-based private equity firm CVC Funds was to acquire up to 30 per cent of the paints and coatings manufacturer. CVC has a network of 29 offices throughout EMEA, the Americas and Asia, and has approximately €186bn of assets under management.
