Wherry, smoothing the bow

Posted by Kelly on May 22, 2004

OK, I'm still working on the d*mned Annapolis Wherry project. And I'm really discouraged, trying to get the outside of the bow smooth. I sanded too much, applied more glass to cover the errors, and a few days ago I applied some wood-thickened epoxy to try to smooth things out. Sort of using it as bondo.

It looks awful. I thought it was nice and smooth when I was applying it. I used a plastic squeegee to trowel it around, and fill in the holes etc. It looked OK as it was drying, but when I tried sanding it today, I found that it was a horrible orange peel pattern. I can't seem to sand it smooth without cutting right down to the fiberglass.

Is this something I should expect the filler, used before painting, to take care of? If I used regular non-thickened epoxy, I'd have no way to keep the epoxy from just running down onto my gunwales. Help!

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