Wingnet rails faired

Progress has been abysmally slow this past week, due to work committments. So here's a brief post, to bring things up to date.

Last Sunday I started putting on the fairing compound, on the rail attachment points:

I have to admit I still cringe, at the ugliness I had to inflict on my floats in order to get these rails attached. :-)

After that, I didn't touch any boat stuff until the following Friday. The fairing compound was cured hard by then, which made sanding it down suck. It finally started to come together though:

Saturday I did some more touchup on the fairing compound, then applied three coats of high-build primer using a brush:

I know I said I'd never brush this stuff on again, but it didn't make much sense to get the spray gun out for such a small job, especially one with such small nooks and crannies.

Today I sanded down the high-build; being reasonably satisfied with the results, I then went ahead and put two coats of finish primer on (looks a lot like the above picture, but with a less-bright white). Hopefully I'll get enough time after work this week to sand those coats down, and get this thing ready for paint (finally - $!#*$).

The rail supports on either side of the large access hatch were positioned with little room to spare, so I checked several times during the fairing to make sure the hatch had enough flat surface on all sides to lie nicely:

The other thing I had time for this weekend, was trimming the daggerboard case sides. Roger Bonnot sent me an email with some pictures showing how he trimmed his (thanks Roger - my return emails bounced for some reason, sorry if it seemed like I was ignoring you.) using a block of wood and a sander. I did mine this way as well and it worked great, much more accurate IMO than feeding it through the table saw (and less chance for mistakes). I used a 3/4" piece of wood, and a 1/4" piece of steel borrowed from a neighbor:

The end-result looked great.

I didn't get around to painting the insides of the case halves yet. Ian replied to my email about the cheekblock assembly, but only to say that it's not ready yet, and to just cut the hole for now. I did some searching on small cheekblocks, and the most likely one I could find was this Schaefer model -- but even that one looked like it would be a bit too wide. Since you're supposed to tap and mount some machine screws before you button up the case, I'm a bit concerned that I don't know exactly what is going to happen here. (Yeah, I realize I'm second-guessing Ian here, shame on me.) Anyway, if any other F22 builders out there have completed the screw mountings for the cheekblock assembly in the case side, would you please drop me a mail with a couple of pics?