Both floats about ready for fairing

Fairly mild progress this week. Most of it has been spent finishing up all of the sanding down of the rough glass edges, especially around the bubble patches (which are all 100% patched, on both floats now). The bubble patches look like hell when viewed head-on, but when I sight along the long (side) view, they're barely visible. Maybe the fairing work won't be so bad.

I also laminated the remaining transom this evening:

And:
The other thing I've been trying to get done, is the last layer of cloth over the chainplates. This has been a bugger of a job -- the angles just don't seem to work for a single piece of cloth to lay down evenly around all sides. I've tried a couple times and always aborted the effort. My next effort, I'll give up on the single piece strategy and go with overlapping pieces of cloth. In the meantime, I decided to build up a putty fillet around the base of the chainplates:

...which I will sand and smooth over of course, before placing the cloth.

Here's the floats side by side:

So basically, I am very very close to starting the fairing. This brings me to my next looming decision: which paint system to go with. I rolled-n-tipped an an earlier project (plywood dinghy) with all System Three products: primer, fairing putty, and paint. It all worked ok except I got runs and visible brush-strokes in my paint job, which I'm still sanding out (in-between working on the F22) -- but this could have been my fault, for painting in weather that was too cold. Regardless, for the F22 I had determined to use a non-waterborne LPU paint and I had just about convinced myself to go with Sterling products, mostly based on this tutorial. Then someone recently mentioned Alexseal products on the F-boat forum, and I've been looking into that the last few days. There are some good testimonials to the quality of Alexseal products on the 'net; also, it is apparently a brand-new, super-modern formulation. So maybe it's better? Not sure. Would I notice the difference on my little F22 even if it is? Decisions, decisions. :)

Last but not least, yesterday afternoon Andrew from Ballard stopped by with his brother to see my project. It was a fun couple of hours -- we chatted about boats, looked over the F22 plans, checked out my float progress and my collection of bulkheads, etc, etc. Andrew is seriously considering starting an F22 project. It will be great to have some additional Pacific NW F22 builders. Over the past six months I've had several queries from folks in the area asking about F22 stuff, but Andrew was the first to actually come by. Thanks Andrew!