Fairing the bevels

OK, I think I managed to recover from my panel-gluing debacle yesterday by fairing them to a consistant level.


I mixed up glue and thickened it to "peanut-butter" consistancy (3 shots of resin and hardener and 8-9 heaping spoonfuls of wood flour). I put this into a ziploc freezer bag and clipped off a bottom corner. I squeezed a line of the thickened epoxy out onto the existing glue line. I then used a putty knive to smooth out the bevels. It took about 2 hours and 2 batches of epoxy to do all eight glue lines. It went much better than I expected (I now have very low expectations when working with a seemingly irreversible step like epoxy). I also used a trick from the instruction manual: about 3 hours after I finished with the first set of four glue lines I wet my glove with denatured alcohol and smoothed the newly-faired bevels. This worked well, and even better on the epoxy that had only 2 hours of cure time.


So, over all, I'm happy with the result. I'm not super thrilled with the consistancy of wood flour thickened epoxy. The denatured alcohol trick helps, but it still has rough texture that will require sanding. I would prefer a thickening agent that doesn't result in such a difficult texture. I hear microlight works well for fairing, but I don't know if it will be strong enough for the non-taped fillets that need to be added (transoms, bulkheads and seats). I don't know if microlight is weaker than wood flour or not. The West System has a "filleting" mix that sounds promising, but if it is going to be difficult to sand then I'm not so sure. I'm going out today to buy some of these thickeners and do some tests.

I've also been thinking about when and how to fill in the holes where the wires went. The instruction manual doesn't talk about this, although it has a photo of it at the prep point for the finish (varnish and/or paint). It seems to me any holes under fiberglass need to be done before the fiberglass goes on. Since fiberglass goes on after the transom and bottom get their fillets, this is sooner rather than later. Filling holes isn't a structural issue, so using microlight might be the best answer.