Float fairing continues #3

Another week of fairing has passed. I am very nearly done now with the outside side of my starboard float. This means I am averaging about one week per float side - but I have no idea if this is good or bad. :-) It is about as fast as I can go though; rate of progress is controlled first by the curing time of the fairing compound, and then by how your schedule fits with that. Warmer weather helps -- it's been mostly nice this week, but today is raining heavily with temps in the mid-40's deg F which sucks because the fairing putty is taking forever to cure.

This past week I managed to do one sand & fill pass every night after work, and 3 passes yesterday. At this rate, I hope to be applying primer to both floats around the middle of June.

I've been taking a lot of pictures, but I think it is hard to really tell the quality of the work from the pictures - you really need to be there to gauge how good or bad the fairing is. And I'm certainly no expert - that said, here's some more pictures and notes.

For some reason I hadn't found time to go pick up a darn notched trowel, and so last Sunday I decided to just get on with the job the same as before. So here's the float side, part-way through covering it with a thin coat of fairing compound:

This float side has very few bubble patches, and the fairing work went pretty smoothly -- but it's still hard work. The longboarding motion very much resembles an upper chest bench press workout in the gym (a place I haven't visited in too many years) -- I was getting a bit sore earlier in the week. This is a picture partway through the initial longboarding:

When longboarding the bow area, I use a tiedown strap to hold the stern down:

The first coat of glop after the initial longboarding is extensive:

Twenty-four hours later though, it's starting to look better (keel line looks pretty fair too):

This was taken Friday evening, after I had longboarded and filled more low spots:

I've also been working on the side-to-deck join radius. This job seems harder than it should be. Here's my "tool", it's just some adhesive 80 grit sandpaper stuck to a piece of PVC pipe:

And here's what it looks like in use:

I should probably glue a handle on it; still, it works okay for the most part but you have to be pretty finicky to make sure the edge looks uniform and even all the way down the float. I have a lot more work for this, on both float.

I think my starboard transom area is looking pretty good too; the longboard doesn't help much here, it takes careful hand sanding:

I've also been working on my port float deck and its inner deck-to-side radius join:
My Ronstan inspection ports finally showed up. I am not 100% happy with them. True, they do have the nice wide top that covers up the screws, but they felt relatively flimsy to me compared to the Beckson and Tempress models that I've looked at it. There's almost zero ribbing underneath the top of the hatch - some folks (especially one particularly hefty boat builder) could step on it someday and crack it. I am still pondering, but there's a good chance I'll end up returning them.

Ian sent out a F22 builder's update mail today. Lots of stuff mentioned, but the most important one IMO is that he is going to be printing and sending out updated plan books. I am happy with this -- there've been a lot of PDF updates sent out, but it's easier to keep track if everything is up-to-date in the plan book.

Oops, this post is getting a bit long. Sorry. One last bit of info: I should be on vacation from work the week of 6/4-6/8. Nine glorious days of...fairing. :) At least progress should be rapid, if I can get 3 sand\fill passes in each day. I also need to get started on my daggerboard case, for which I have the mold all ready from last winter.