After a brief hiatus

due to an abscess on a wisdom tooth (which gets yanked on Monday) it's back to the Sandinsanity! This time we're sanding fairing compound. Wohoo! I'd guess the patch of fairing compound I laid down earlier in the week was about 40 sq. ft. or so. I've never done anything this big before and wasn't sure what to expect. I knew it would likely be at least a two coat process and from the looks of the results it will be at least that.

They call this stuff Quickfair but I wish it was Easyfair but it's not. It's hard as a rock and takes quite a bit of muscle to work it down. I start out with the RO sander to get the ridges and shiny stuff off then hit it with the Dura Block long board. (still waiting for my Flexicat which will apparently ship on Monday or Tuesday).

If you look close you can still see some low spots that will require another coat. These are usually along the tape or fabric edges. I tried to get a little extra on them but didn't quite make it.

You can actually see in the pic above a bit of the splice (joint) in the bottom panels and these were faired before and have 45 oz of fabric over them.

Here's a close up of one of the tape edges where you can see the low spot still showing the weave of the fabric underneath.

I'll have to sand these down and hit them again with another coat of fairing compound. Oh, and you guessed it, more sanding!

When you get it right and sanded it leaves a pretty nice surface that should almost be ready to take high build epoxy primer and paint.

You can see my 'Handy Dandy Sander Holder' AKA the bow thruster tunnel! I better patent that before someone else steals my idea! :-)

Below is one of the larger sections and represents about 2-1/2 hours of sanding with the RO and long board.

I think one more ultra thin coat of Quickfair will finish a section like this off. I'll move onto the keel next now that I have a better idea of how this stuff works.

Canadian Tire had a 45 page flyer this week!  :-)  Have had my eye on this lil' gadget for a long time but wasn't willing to pay the $30 price tag. Low and behold it was in the flyer at $17.99 so I jumped on it! I think it'll come in real handy in the future!

That's about it for now. Heading south of the border for Dirty Gringo Nacho's! I deserve it!