Upon my return from Sail Oklahoma, I continued work on the hull bottom. In places where the fiberglass overlapped I needed to apply fairing compound and sand it back to make the transition gradual.
At the bow, the cloth on the garboard planks overlaps the bow transom, and the cloth on the tramsom overlaps the other way, and onto planks 2 and 3, which have no cloth.
The seam in the cloth falls across the garboard plank in front of the centerboard slot,
And at the stern transom cloth laps both ways, plus an extra thickness where the seam between the two pieces of cloth on the bottom meet.
The fairing mixture I used was epoxy thickened with micro-balloons (tiny glass spheres that sand easily. I applied it to all the places shown above and sanded it back. There were still a couple low spots (more easily detected with the hand than the eye), so I applied more to those areas and sanded again.
I eventually got to a point where I decided it was good enough', and then applied a final coat of epoxy. I did that because I felt there were some tiny spots in the weave of the glass cloth that were not fully filled, and on planks 2 and 3 there were a couple areas where I had accidentally sanded down to or close to bare wood.
The real test of how well I did on the fairing will be when the paint is on and the boat is out in the sun catching reflections from everything around. But the shiny fresh epoxy gives a preview and confirms that it's good enough for me.
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