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The first stage, as ever, involves a lot of sanding, the boat has been varnished on a regular basis so in order to put the new AWLWood on it we need make sure we have a solid foundation. It is also an opportunity to fair the hull and work the deeper dents out. Because the boat is wooden and we want to keep the natural wood finish we can’t just fill the hull with filler. Instead we need to build up layers of varnish, it takes more time but should give a better overall look, we just need to ignore the whispers from the epoxy filler on the shelf…
AWLWood needs the surface sanded to a 240 Grit, so that is the grit we’ve used for sanding. We are trying to avoid getting to bare wood so using the finer sand paper may take a bit longer but we should get a better finish as we will have the additional depth of the previous layers of varnish.
As with all our fairing work whether it is a hull or a foil we are using our flexible long board over most of the boat in an X pattern to ensure we don’t flat spot the hull. As can be seen from the feature image above the Kirby 7 has concave sections designed to allow a narrower hull than the class rise of floor rule allows for.
We are using the specialist foam sanding blocks (Style-Line Soft-Sander) we used on GBR-1537 our modern I14. They are designed with different shapes including various curves etc, which are ideal for ‘Freebooter’.
We are well into the 20 side of the 80:20 rule, while we are building up the dents in the hull, we are doing the final detail sanding on the hull – gunwale interface. Annoyingly the temperature decided to drop massively this week, so it is taking a while longer for the varnish filling process is taking longer to cure. This is likely to take a while, especially in the transom where there has been, predictably, damage which needs building back up. If nothing else it means a break from sanding. 🙂
Video of the port side: Sanded, the starboard side is now also done.