Kaimusailing

When I put a coat of raw epoxy on my experimental fairing job, the flaws showed up, as bad as ever. My technique was not fool proof, it required more diligence. It is hard to see the unfairness of the first “corduroy” layer after it is sanded. The next “flat” layer needs the corduroy to be fair when it fills in the little valleys. The final smooth high silica content layer is difficult to sand and really needs to be as fair as possible. It is this layer that needs the most care and maybe extra time to make it come out smooth.
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The problem is that the epoxy will not wait forever, it will begin to get thicker and more difficult to spread as it begins to cure, especially if it gets hot in the mixing container. So, the best thing to do is mix it and put it on right away along one edge of the area to be faired, then pass the trowel and work with it as long as you can. Mixing small batches helps prevent the premature curing. On a hot day I mix a 1.5 oz. mix of epoxy which will prime and fair about 4-5 sq ft.
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I tried a red mohair roller skin from Sherwin-Williams with 1/4“ nap and phenolic cylinder. It was pricey, but I tried it out to find out if it would dissolve or lose its nap in the arctic white two part paint. It worked fine. I didn’t need to roll out any of the small paint jobs, so I made a pad painter out of the roller skin, just like Goudgeon Brothers epoxy book says. The photo is of one of the pad painters. The skin is cut lengthwise into three long pieces, then the pieces are cut to length, in this case 3“. This produces a 3 inch wide pad painter. I had been using cheap chip brushes to paint and had lots of brush marks. I used one of the leftover chip brush handles to make the handle for the pad painter. With the pad painter there wasn’t more paint applied, but no brush marks, so the finish looked better even with the first coat.
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I will find more phenolic mohair roller skins, hopefully at a lower price. An older boater in this yard is doing a roll and tip paint job and got some roller skins called FoamPRO Fine Finish, but for some reason he was getting orange peel and a dusty looking paint job. Maybe the breeze was up when he was painting. He thought the roller skins were better than what he had been using. Another boater preparing to do a paint job with Quantum paint was using their proprietary rollers. The idea is to get a smooth finish without orange peel or bubbles, and the roller skin has a lot to do with the bubbles.
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I painted the rudders with two coats of arctic white and used the pad painters for half of the job. They look more or less the same as they did when the boat was assembled 15 years ago. The other paint job was the port bow repair. One side looks great, the other side has noticeable unfair marks in the surface. I left it like that as a reminder to be more careful in future fairing jobs.