Bad day to be Sandpaper

Still working in and around the bow area cleaning up seams & drips etc.  In the first 5 minutes I went through one brand new sanding belt and three disks, all 40 grit. The 3 yr old epoxy glue is hard as diamonds and just rips them to shreds.

One of the hardest areas to get at is the bow and around the bow thruster tube. The hull bottom slopes up quickly and there's no place to stand so when I have to work low I'm on my knees sliding out of my knee pads! *sigh*

I'll eventually have to go in there and sand by hand but the little detail sander makes quick work of it. Great little tool but you have to be careful, it's a 'Weapon of Mass Destruction all on its own! ;-)  Big benefit is it can be operated with one hand quite easily.

The air powered RO is my next favorite tool. It really is the workhorse of the whole operation. I make double sure I oil it every day before use and it's holding up better than the first one.

When we laid the side panels on the forms ohhhhhhhhh about 3 yrs ago I had two of the butt joints fail. They didn't break just bent in a way they shouldn't have. I can only guess it was the stress of the long sheets being bent over the forms to shape up the bow.

You can see th white line running down the middle of the joint. The fiberglass tape has buckled indicating it has been crushed.

Opened up the joint today with the detail sander to see what was going on inside. The glue join looks fine so it was just the fiberglass tape. I'll fill this as I go and retape the joints. This happened on both sides. It's what caused a bump in the panels on the outside that took me weeks to fair out properly.

I'm about 1/3 done the sanding on the inside. If the weather cooperates I'll fill the kerfs in the bottom panel and do some filleting of the seams etc. till I run out of materials.

Standby.....