Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Wingnet rails, part 5

I can't believe it's already late July -- the summer feels half-way over, and I still haven't painted my floats. Ouch. Anyway, this is just a short post to update my progress. I wish I had more to report, but work and family have been keeping me pretty busy.

Last Monday or Tuesday evening, I re-primed my port float with four coats (first coat in gray, as before). I then spent the rest of the week sanding the floats back down to 400 grit. Really this went pretty fast. I attribute this to the fact that the sprayed-on primer lays down really, really nice, and I was able to use my electric sander with 220 grit right from the start. With my earlier rolled-on primer coats, I ended up with much stippling in the surface that required a lot of longboarding to cleanup; I think I wasted a lot of primer that way. To be fair, the Alexseal rep had warned me that their primers weren't really designed for rolling. I won't ever roll the primer on again.

The gray primer base coat helped a ton, especially around the edges (keel, bow, transom, etc). It was a pain to have to clean the gun and mix new primer right after the first coat, but I loved that feeling of security you get when you can visibly tell you're "getting close". Even so, I did get a couple of sand-thru spots, one on a transom edge and one a keel area near a bow, due to carelessness. Not a big deal compared to how many I had before. I won't post any pictures of the re-sanded floats, since they are fairly boring at this point.

I procrastinated somewhat on the fairing of my wingnet rails because I didn't want to deal with sanding on these long floppy parts. On Sunday I finally got the job started, putting on the first coat of fairing compound:


And today I got around to sanding:

This was followed by a second thin coat of fairing compound, to fill in the imperfections. (Hmm, I seem to remember this procedure from somewhere? :) I believe I'll need at least three fair-sand passes on the outside (visible) parts of the wingnet rails, but I'm still debating how far I want to take the under-side though, since it will be rarely seen.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ok you lost me here ... you primed the floats again, but the wingnet rails are still not attached?

Tom

Jay said...

Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Correct, both floats are now re-finish-primed and sanded down to 400 grit. Once the rails are ready to go, I will be grinding down the floats at each of the rail attachment points, then attaching the rails. Once attached, each attachment point will need fairing, high-build primer, sanding, finish-primer, and final sanding, to blend it all back into the existing faired float surfaces. But that will all be do-able with the floats in an upright position, which should make it easier.

Well that's the plan anyway. I couldn't think of any better way to do it; and I wanted to minimize how much I need to man-handle the floats once the rails are attached.

hope this makes sense!

Jay