Starting to work on finishing the fairing
The boat was removed from the shed before the keel fairing was completed. I was given the opportunity to do the finishing work myself or pay aprox 20 to 30 more hours of labor to have the boatyard do the finishing. 30 hours of labor would be 2300$ plus material charges. I was surprised that the price of finishing would be this high so I had no choice but to roll up my sleeves and dust off my trusty Makita sander. I think the glass guy expected to finish the job as the last layer of Low-Density filler was applied very unevenly. He probably counted on another application after this one but now it is I that must deal with it. Note the following pictures. I don't understand why he did such a hack job putting this stuff on !
The first thing I did was to rough sand the entire area removing all the high spots to prepare for another coat of fairing material. The product we are using is West System low density filler additive number 407 (microballons). These next few pictures are of the area after it has been sanded. This took about 3 hours of backbreaking work. It would have been easier if the fairing had been applied with more care. During this part of the job I had my first casualty. The Makita random orbital sander I had been using made a noise that sounded like one of the buzz bombs used on England during WWII it started to smoke and that was the end of the thing. I replaced it on line for 100$. The pictures below are of the work completed before the untimely death of my first sander.
Next I marked out all the low areas and added more microballons. Once this next application was added the whole area was starting to level off. I found an uneven area behind the keel so I filled that area as well. At Jamestown Distributions, a local marine supply company, I bought a 16” flat board sander which made it easier to get everything more even and after this battle with microballons and sandpaper I switched to West System microlight additive # 410 as fairing material. This fairing compound has very little strength but sands easily and allows for a very fine feather edge to blend the repaired area with the hull. At this point I am filling very minor imperfections in the surfaces. The following pictures show the application of the microlight compound.
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fairing compleated
The last of the keel fairing operation has been completed. It took about 8 separate applications of West System epoxy and fairing additive to complete this part of the project. The Port side of the keel was the most problematic for this was the side of the keel that the bad keel bolts were removed from. When the hot lead was poured into the hollowed out areas covering up the new bolts the lead was ground semi flat. There were many low spots that had to be faired in. Now that this has been done several coats of Interprotect 2000 will be used to seal the entire area. A few pictures of the sanded area ready to be painted.
