Fairing progress

Finally got to take some vacation this year, and family was informed in advance that most of it was going to my boat.   That sounds a bit mean, but I really need to finish this thing sooner or later and it won't happen on its own.

I don't have pictures for most of progress this year so far, but in summary:    sanded down last year's primer coat on the bottom of the boat, faired\fixed a bunch of imperfections, sprayed more primer, more sanding, got it down to 150 grit and looking (and feeling) pretty good.  

At that point my son helped me flip the boat over, but to be honest the weight of the boat took us by surprise and the boat bottom dragged against some of the tent frames as it rotated on the way down, leaving some minor gouges, I need to fix that later.

Once flipped, more sanding, spray primer, more sanding.   My goal is to get some paint on this thing before I go back to work, but the weather is marginal and I may not make it.

Removing the foam core around the windows and filling it with epoxy is a catchup job that I left for too long, finally finished it up:

Sanding around beam mounts is a chore:

Took me about nine hours of sanding today to do the entire upper half of the boat.   Feels like most of my expensive primer ends up as a dust cloud - thank goodness for respirators.   Nice to see it with a more uniform color:

 

 

I am still using the Alexseal paint system, which means I have another layer of finish primer to apply before getting to the top coat.  

Catchup post - 2014 progress

I'm trying to catch the blog up, hence this belated post.   Not much to show, but I did work on the boat a little bit last year.   Same old story - working a lot, six-day weeks for almost two years in a row (I like my job so this is not as bad as it sounds).    Also, looking back at my picture archive, I did virtually nothing in 2013 (spent most of my vacation time on a three-week trip to Europe) so don't expect a catchup post for that year.

In September 2014 I found some time to continue fairing the bottom of the boat.   I decided to apply a skim coat of epoxy just to seal things up (and hopefully to help fix some of the minor imperfections).   This picture was taken right before I applied the epoxy:

As you can tell, the masking was quite rudimentary.    I wish I had some pictures of the epoxy coating, but as I recall it was one giant sticky mess - not fun.

After sanding the epoxy coat smooth, I applied three coats of high-build primer:

And then that's how things sat over the winter.