Starboard float ready for fairing

Nothing too exciting this weekend. Dad and I spent a few hours playing duelling sanders (after I went and bought a second orbital sander). Took a few pictures… Overlaps actually look worse in the picture than in person (most likely due to flash and shadows). Hopefully won’t take too much fairing compound.

While sanding we found a small void (about 1/4″x1″) where the deck slopes into the transom bulkhead. Sanded it all the way out and glassed over it with peel-ply.

Also finished putting bog into the dug-out areas for the hatches. All that this float needs now is a quick cleaning and then start fairing it.

Decided to weigh the float while we were at it. Seems like every time we do work it gets heavier! Ian calculated the theoretical (ideal) weight of a float to be 112 lbs. Our starboard float weighs 143 lbs. A little on the portly side, but not too bad considering there are a few areas with extra resin, we are using heavier tape (12oz with 8oz csm in a 4″ width instead of 3″), the heaviest choice of fabrics (2oz heavier for each type) and the floats are made with A550 CoreCell instead of A400.

The hose on our shop-vac (over 20 years old, and the second hose for it) finally had too many cracks to pull dust from the sander anymore.

So a new hose was purchased

We also decided to go ahead and “upgrade” to a newer shop (wet-dry) vac that will accept a HEPA filter and bought an extra exhaust diffuser. Seems to work very nice and is quiet compared to the old one.

Was going to glass the bottom of the port deck but saw a bunch of areas that needed touching up this afternoon. Bog did not have enough time to dry for sanding. Will try and do this next time, though I suspect I’ll be busy fairing.

During the last week I ordered the System Three QuickFair to try out for the floats (which I’ve heard very good things about), their Water-Born Epoxy Primer, some more hand lay-up hardener and a refurbished HVLP spray-gun. Am going to hold off on the actual LPU paint until it’s time.

Time Spent: 7 hours

ADDENDUM – No pictures of it, but the float has *zero* problem supporting either one of us while sitting on the cradles… I don’t think I saw it flex at ALL while sitting/standing on it. Have been curious about this ever since starting and now we finally know.