How to Make a Kayak - Scraping, Sanding and Fairing and Dust Control

Scraping

I first scrape the boat with a heavy duty paint scraper. This removes the any glue drips and starts to knock the corners off the strips.

Sanding & Fairing

How coarse a grit of sandpaper you start with depends on how fast you want to go. Starting with 60 grit will remove a lot of wood quite quickly. This is good if you have some rough spot. I find that if I use cove and bead strips, the surface starts out quite smooth. So, in this case I started with 80 grit because it did not need that much work to get the initial smooth surface. With hand beveled strip it is more likely there will be high spots in need to knocking down.

I'm trying to keep dust under control a bit better. I recently got a long board that hooks up to my vacuum. It does a nice job of basic sanding while sucking the dust up before it gets into the air. I had previously purchased a Festool random orbital which is also very good at catching the dust. The one problem I have had is after a while the vacuum starts to lose flow as the filter fills up with dust. I also got an Oneida  Dust Deputy. This is a mini-cyclone system that uses centrifugal force and gravity to get the dust out of the vacuum air stream before it makes it to the filter. This is the same idea Dyson uses on their overpriced units. The Oneida system is very effective, it collects most of the dust coming from the sander. I did find that with the new long board system that when the board was on the boat, there was not that much flow, as a result the vacuum pressure increased in the drum, sucking the cyclone head down into the barrel a bit. I will have to reinforce the barrel cover a bit to keep it from fatiguing.

I went over everything with 80 then 100 grit paper before wetting it down. I then hit it all with 120 grit on the random orbital, followed by more 120 on the long board. I find the Festool leaves more swirl marks than my Porter Cable random orbital, but the long board does a good job of removing them.