Well after 3 times sanding, puttying and sanding, shes finally smooth as a babies bottom. I made a few observations along the way:

1. Be damn careful when sanding the hull. Dont just grab the hull and go to town sanding because like a fine woman, if u treat her to rough u will have problems like with the hull, u will crack some of the balsa planking..
2. If u see some planks popping up, use so thin ca glue and glue the planks together and keep on sanding.
3. Try and use the same amount of putty on each side of the hull in order to try and maintain balance, the putty weighs more than the balsa does.

Query, did you seal the inside with epoxy first to give some stability?

NOW U TELL ME hahahahahahaha, nope, I intended to do it after the sanding. But that will be my next step. I did use a thin CA glue to seal all the cracks between the planks, which did give more stability to the hull or at least some anyway.

mike

Sorry. Sealing the cracks with CA was a good idea, sealing the inside inside requires sealing the cracks first so the epoxy doesn't run out through them. Sounds logical but I forgot to do it the first time I built a model boat - yuk!

Bob

I know Bob, I'm lookng ahead at that and all those fines times I'm about to have. Maybe a few jack and cokes will cause me not to care to much one way or the other hahahahaha.

I covered bottom of hull with masking tape to help with cleanup and run outs of resin later.

Real good precaution; I think most of your cracks are sealed with the CA but . . . why make a mess for the leaky one, or two or three. The hull almost looks pretty with the blue painters tape on it.

Yeah I thought the same thing, might be a color option for future reference when I get to that stage.

Well, anti-fouling paint does come in blue these days,
but it wouldn't be faithful to the era if that's what you
want to do.

The only thing Im faithful to is my wife, anything else is up for grabs. I'm a ccolorful guy that likes blues, reds,yellows and not so much black. Now, if someone bought the Commander before I'm done with it and wanted traditional colors, I would consider it.

mike

I spent about the last two hours fiberglassing the inside of the hull. I learned a few things like next time i will use smaller pieces of cloth rather than trying to go from the keel all the way up the sides with one strip of cloth.

The second is to have a second bowl with nothing but denatured alcohol in it to dip my brush in and then use to help smooth out the resin and cloth. It was a tight fit between the bulkheads and no place any type of roller. But all in all, not a bad job.

Very valuable lessons - always save your scraps of fiberglass in a plastic baggie, now you know why. Good practice for glassing the exterior, it will be easy peasy.

Bob

Thanks Bob, I have started a baggie just for those scraps. I used the 1.5oz cloth for the interior, but I will try the 4 oz on the outer hull and see how it goes.

Once the interior of the hull dried, i removed the masking tape. All of those darker colorations would have been cleanup from epoxy oozing out of any hole or crack.

Mike,

WOW! Just look at all the extra sanding you saved by applying tape. That would have been one 'drippy' mess, much less trying to handle the hull during application, ugh.

Unless you're going to use this boat as an icebreaker, to ram other boats or you run at high speeds in a rock infested pond, I don't see the need for 4 oz fiberglass cloth on the exterior of the hull. One oz to 1.5 oz cloth should be more than adequate. I've been using Nick Zoril's 1 oz cloth and Z poxy finishing resin with no regrets. (I think I misspelled Nicks's name - sorry Nick)

Bob