The never ending story of sanding the hull

Once I had the boat turned over and in the garage, I could start the work on the hull. This took forever...Started by grinding out every crack (which there were many more than I originally anticipated). From the grinding I went to the sanding...sanding the entire hull with the random orbital sander and 120 grit paper. The dust was nasty, so needed a good breathing filter.

After I was all sanded, I started with the fairing compound. I ended up needing multiple coats of the fairing compound. First to fill all the cracks and then to put a smooth final coat for all the small crazing. You can see the green thin set in the pictures. Sanding all of this down, took days to finish. I would do an hour at a time when I could after work, not much you can do to speed it up.

I didn't have any major fibreglass work that needed new sheets of glass. Luckily I was able to get the hull straight and smooth with just the fairing compound. There was some previous fibreglass work done that was a little bumpy, I did try my best to sand it down, but in the end just decided to smooth out as best I could and get the primer over top of it.

Also used the fairing compound to reshape the bow eye hook area - it was pretty mangled from years of abuse - that took multiple takes of compound, sanding / shaping and again.

Once I was ready to get the total protect primer on, I cleaned the entire bottom side with acetone. Rolling the total protect on was pretty easy, with some standard 4" foam rollers - they did come apart pretty easily, so used a handful with each coat. I ended up with 3 coats of the primer and it looked great.

I did make a mistake at this point - I sanded the boat lightly by hand prior to putting the wet edge paint on, and the primer was a little pebbly. This combined with the first coat of wet edge not being thinned made my first coat of wet edge extremely bumpy - pebble like finish. After this first mistake I spent more time sanding the hull to get it as smooth as possible, but never really was able to do get it completely smooth. Also I thinned the wet edge 10% for the next coats, and that helped incredibly. In the end I put on an additional 4 coats (5 in total, but the first didn't count since I sanded most of it off).

Finally after about 3 months I'm building vs. taking apart the boat.

Pretty pleased with the end product, certainly learned how to do it better next time, but it looks great.

Next step - turn the boat over, prime and paint the top side...