Flats Stalker 18

15. Fairing the Outside (Cont'd)

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Bill of Materials
1. The Strongback
2. The Pencil
3. Wood Butchering
4. Transom
5. Joining Panels
6. Round Chine Option
7. Jig Assembly
8. Stitching it all together
9. Tabbing & Filleting
10. Fiberglassing the Seams
11. Glassing the Hull Bottom
12. Fiberglassing the Sides
13. Fairing Slurry
14. Fairing - A Strategy
15. Fairing the Outside (Cont'd)
16. Skeg
17: Rubrails
18. Primer
19. Hull Flip
20. Inside Taping
21. Inside Cloth
22. Stringers & Knees
23. Installing Frames
24. Sole
25. Rod Holders
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Fairing the Outside (Cont'd)

It's been a couple of productive weeks. I'm close to being done with the primary fairing of the of the hull. I'll soon be adding the rub rails and skeg. I'll prime the outside of the hull after that. I'd rather glue the rails & skeg down to the hull before priming so the glue will be bonded to the fairing compound and not a layer of primer.

Anyway let me walk you through a couple of quick areas that I pretty much finished with and show you how I got there...

The rear 2/3rds of the boat is divided into 2 flat sections meeting at the keel. This flat area is about a good 10+ feet long. As previously mentioned I used a ridged piece of extruded aluminum to fair out this area. Here's a some shots of the tools used...

The last picture shows the sheet rock or wallpaper knife I used at first. This wasn't a good tool for me. It flexed and even though the edge was straight it would leave depressions and uneven areas in the fairing compound.

Here's some shots of the bottom with fresh fairing compound (a ketchup like consistency)...

Here's a technique that should have been decent in theory, but was mediocre when tried - The photo shows a couple of beads of fairing compound run parallel with the keel. The idea was to put these down and then sand them to a point where they would be even in height with a straight edge from keel to chine.

I figured the "guide beads" would help prevent the depressions I was leaving when faring the large area on the hull bottom. This was when I was still using the long, blue handled drywall knife. After this idea fizzled, I started using the rigid aluminum sections.

Here's some shots of another technique I tried for building up the transom and chine edges so they could be sanded to a sharp edge. (Later, during the priming step, I'll put a very slight radius on the edge. I figured it would be much easier to get a uniform radius on the finished edge if I started with a sharp one.) I used packaging tape on the vertical edge surfaces and allowed the tape to kind of bow back away from the side. This allowed the void to be over filled with a little extra fairing compound so I could then sand it back to the true intersection. It's kind of hard to see since the tape is clear. The last shot shows the corner of the transom with the tape pulled back a little.

The last area I'll show a little detail on is the rounded chine section near the bow. Here there were some flat spots and general unevenness from the strips forming the curved chine. I made a tool to apply the fairing compound uniformly to each side of the hull. It's just a plastic spreader bent to the appropriate radius and held in that postion using fiberglass packaging tape.

Here are some various shots showing the sharp edges and general fairing. Note that even though there appears to be a lot of different color patches, these are just different batches that cure to a slightly different color and surface texture. The really dark maroon colored areas are unsanded.