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