7.09.2012

Visual proportioning

As a first step in the painting process, it is important to make sure that the boat is the right shape. Since all joints are covered with double biased tape, this results in a slight surface discontinuity. One way to deal with this is to sand the edges of the tape then apply some filler compound. I have found it best to use a mixture of epoxy and glass micro balloons over all the seams, sand them and then apply a ready formulated faring compound. System Three offers a really nice product called "QuickFair" and although it is sinfully expensive,  if you apply it with a blade, very little final sanding is required. 

To mix the filler. here's a little trick I taught myself that makes mixing easier. I call it visual proportioning. I mark out a proportional surface area on a cookie sheet and cover the areas.  By varying  the thickness of each component, it is possible to control the volume of faring compound required for particular jobs.   


two parts A to one part B filler

visual proportion

mixing

smoothing and sanding the port side stern steps and kick up rudder box.

1 comments:

Tim Salter said...

Just wanted to encourage you. My wife and I have been following your blog for over a year now and enjoy the updates a lot. We are hoping to start the same process in the next two years. Keep the updates coming. If you don't feel like typing you can always just post pics. It's always enjoyable to show them to my wife and kids. Also, your brother's sense of humor is a bit too much like mine and my brothers. Which makes me think I should maybe not give him the ability to post comments. :)