February 8, 2023

Further 41

Wednesday

Once more I sanded the cockpit areas, this time with finer grit discs, bringing the various faired edges closer to where they needed to be, but with a number of low  areas around the edges still to be dealt with; such is the way of fairing.  But things were at the point where I expected one more round of filling would take care of things for the most part, and after that I could move on to the final stage of finish sanding the entire cockpit.

Next, I sanded the various fillets along the deck edges as needed, then finish-sanded the cabin sides through 80-120 grits on a 4″ palm sander and by hand as needed.  The cabin sides were original gelcoat in good condition, so sanding was straightforward.

Then, I continued by sanding the toerails on all sides with 120 grit.  The inside edges of the toerails had been sanded a number of times during the nearby work on the decks and fillets, and the outside of the rails required only the light sanding to prepare for the next steps.

With a meeting planned on the morrow with the owners and the dodger contractor to pattern the new dodger, I turned my focus to preparing the boat, which meant lots of cleanup.  Knowing of this date in advance, I’d not bothered to clean up the shop after last week’s work, and the interior of the boat needed some cleanup after many weeks of major deck work, so now it was time to get things ready for the meeting, which took up the remainder of the day.

Total time billed on this job today: 7 hours

0600 Weather Observation: 28°, clearing, 3" snow overnight, dew point 24°. Forecast for the day: Mostly sunny, 42°