The Art of Sanding and Fairing a Stitch-and-Glue Kayak - Petrel Play SG - E26

Hey, welcome back to the Guillemot Kayaks Workshop. I'm Nick Schade, this is Bill, and we are working on the Petrel Play SG, a stitch and glue sea kayak kit from Chesapeake Light Craft. It's my design; CLC provided the kit. In the last episode, I think we worked on the combing, and in this episode, I think I'd like to get us to a fill coat. But before that, we want to do sanding, and the sanding we're doing here is fairing or leveling. We're trying to make the surface level and smooth. We're not trying to get it sanded completely. We're trying to get it leveled completely, so there's a distinction there.

We're trying to get the high spots. We don't necessarily need to get the low spots again. If we're trying to level the surface, we're going to take down the high spots and try to make them match the low spots. There's no amount of sanding we can do to the low spots to make them come up to the high spots. So, we're not trying to get everything sanded; we're trying to get everything leveled out. Just sort of keep that in mind as you're doing this process. It's not about getting it all sanded out and looking sanded; it's about getting it all leveled out and smooth.

Are we concerned with those low spots? Are we concerned with bonding when we put a new coat on? As far as we will be, and so what we're going to do after we've done this leveling and sanding is we'll come by with a Scotchbrite pad and just gloss it. Okay, so we're not trying to remove material there; we're just trying to make sure it's a bondable surface. It's got some mechanical tooth there. Yeah, so again, the sanding is one step where we're leveling, and then, okay, we're ready to go to the fill coat or whatever will be the next process. And that's a matter of, okay, are there shiny spots left? Okay, and the what we're going to do is sand until either there's no shiny spots left, or we start hitting the fiberglass.

We've gone through a lot of effort to put fiberglass on here to reinforce the boat. We do not want to sand that fiberglass away. You don't want to break any fibers. You know, it's inevitable we'll break some. Yeah, but we don't want to sand deeply into it and really cut all the yarns. If we break a couple of fibers, okay, not ideal, but not a big deal. Okay, where if we sand so you, we'll start to see the texture. That's when we stop. If we see the texture, keep on sanding, keep on sanding, and then the texture goes away, we haven't solved the problem; we've made a problem. Yeah, and again, it's if we have a couple of spots where we sand through the glass, I don't recommend it, but it's not the end of the at this point.

We're going to start by just sort of, we'll feel about, give it an inspection. There's still some places where there's some blue tape left from before. We'll scrape that blue tape off, find any drips. I'll address how we deal with the drips shortly, but let's start by getting the blue tape off, and let me let me move the camera. I think I'll move it over here. There's a lot more over here. Okay, it's kind of doing this on something so shiny. Yeah.

So, like files and so forth, these tools do their best work on the pieces, so sort of scrubbing at them doesn't help well. It can do the job, but it sort of dulls the tool fast, removes the oh. Yeah, I was just getting impatient. I think. Yeah, and that's not uncommon. Oh, yeah, so you, what did you do there that made that so much more effective? The angle of the blade. You angled the blade, and you really concentrated on the spot you were trying to get right, and so get the blade itself that's doing the cutting right on that spot, and it goes away pretty quick. Yeah, rather than just shotgun with a lot of fast strokes. Yeah, good little speckled hen.

Scrape, so there is quite a bit of resin on there, cuz I'm, yeah, quite a bit is coming off, and I'm not hitting any glass right. You know, that's the point of the fill coats we put on in earlier episodes was to bury the glass under some epoxy, so we have something to remove to level everything out.

Okay, if I'd come and done this trimming, peeling the tape off while the epoxy was still a bit soft, we wouldn't have to do all this scraping right? This was because I let it sit there for three days before I came in. Yeah, I remember you saying that. Yeah, well, all right. Here we have some ripples in the glass, a little bit of air bubbles under them, but they're sticking up quite a bit. We'd like to level those down, and the inclination is to take some sort of sanding pad and try and sand those away. You end up sanding on either side of that without doing that much damage to the actual part you're interested in. Where if I use a rasp, this is only going to attack the high spots.

I'm using the coarse side of the rasp and laying it down flat against there, and you think, well, that's really scary because, you know, I'm attacking the glass with a really coarse tool, but if I lay it flat down there, this is not going to ever go down to the surface around it until it's gotten those high spots down. So, in a couple of strokes, that's now pretty close to level with everything around it. Now, when I go to sand it, I'm not trying to deal with those high spots anymore. It's just a couple of strokes with a good stiff tool, taking that to the next logical conclusion. How do we sand off this whole surface and level it out?
We want something that's coarse, and we want something that's stiff. So this is kind of a long board, this one's got a little bit of cushion to it, but it's fairly stiff. And then this is a roll of self-adhesive 60 grit sandpaper. I've used 40 grit sandpaper; that's aggressive to do some of the sanding. I intend to put another fill coat on this right, so you're not worried about scratching and right, the scratches are going to be filled with epoxy with the fill coat. I'm not worried about making a fine surface here.

Again, we are leveling; we're not sanding. I am a strong advocate of having dust collection on all your sanding. Fiberglass and epoxy and wood breathing into your lungs, it's all bad for you right? Any particulate matter is not good. So this can be hooked up to a vacuum hose, and over here, I've got on the wall over there a tool to perforate this. So now it's got holes in it. We've got this 60 grit, and again, we're leveling here; we're not trying to sand.

I talked about earlier about rounding over these chines and how that makes the boat sort of more durable because they're sort of exposed edges that are, you hit a rock, and it's going to sort of cut right through that. So this is paper with rocks on it right, so we don't want to hit the chine here at all with the tool. We want to lay the tool flat on the surface and run it flat on the surface. We're not ever going to go across the corner here, so when we're done sanding here, we're going to have a nice shiny spot along the chine, along the keel, everywhere. So we're going to go and do the whole surface like this, and you can start to see just in a little bit of sanding action there. You can see the high spots starting to show up, just the sags in the epoxy from doing the fill coats, but it doesn't take long to get those leveled down.

And I know people want to use power tools, and I want to use power tools. You know, part of what we're trying to do is do this quickly and efficiently without damaging what the work we've put into it. Sure, if I had 80 grit or 60 grit on a power sander, one little lapse in focus, and you, you're going right through. By using coarse grit sandpaper and, you know, being sort of intentional about how you do it, it's actually not going to take all that long to do a good job, and the risk of doing harm is much less with the hand sanding like this right? And once you sort of get a feel for it, the idea we're keeping the tool flat on the surface, and we're not finding these, uh, shiny remaining spots here and going in and trying to deal with those. Okay, um, which tends to be when you get a power tool, you say, oh, this place looks like it needs more sanding, hm, and so when you sand it enough, you can basically run your hand along this, and you might feel some of those indentations, but what you won't feel is the humps right, the lumps. Yeah, yeah, and we can keep on sanding until these shiny spots are gone if we don't hit the fiberglass first right, you know, in the process of this video, we'll probably hit the fiberglass, and up here where we've got the added layers of fiberglass we put along the keel line, we're going to have to sand into those in order to feather those away. We'll see what it looks like into the glass back there. But for now, let's turn on the vacuum systems. We'll do that without a lot of talking for a while and see how it goes.

So again, flat against the surface. It's kind of a whole body experience. So the inclination really is to try to stand those out, right? Yeah, you think that's what needs to happen.

Yeah, now, do you usually do these smaller flat pots with a smaller thing, or you, yeah, yeah, you want to start doing the side now, or you want to wait on that? You can start with the on the sides now, yeah.  

The dust collection works well. Yeah.

So I think this back, you got to get with the smaller one, eh? Yeah, let's let's talk about it a little bit here.

Here, all right, what did you think of that? Well, I had some concern about how deep I should go along this seam. You can start seeing a little bit, and I wasn't sure if I should go more or not, and you said go a little bit more. This piece of cloth here, what are we doing with that piece of cloth? What purpose does that serve in the structure of the boat? Oh, it keeps the top and the together, right? Yeah, yeah, we don't want to remove stuff at the joint between the top and the bottom, right, but we need to, in order to make it smooth, we can feather in away from that joint. Feathering in, yeah, okay, yeah, gotcha, that makes sense, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, so let me get some closeups of what we're looking at here.

So here's the seam we're talking about. So you can see the glass overlap from the deck down onto the hull here. This is the edge of the glass here, and you can start to see the weave showing through, and then we did a fill coat that went a little bit farther, that's giving us something to feather in there. Here you can see the texture of the glass, that weave pattern, so checkerboards showing through there, cross-hatching.  We don't have any shiny spot here; here's a shiny spot, there's a shiny spot, but in here, it's a nice smooth transition from here, from above it all the way in here, so of no texture here. So there's some thickness of epoxy there, then we see we get a glimpse of the texture, and then right in here, the texture disappears again, ah, went too far, right? So paying attention to, you know, when you see it and when it starts to disappear, and you know, are we in a place surrounded by the texture? So you see a little bit of texture below it, a little texture above it, on either end. So that's sort of a hole in the glass right there, right, right, right. So that's what we're talking about when we say look for that texture of the cloth.

And here along this seam, we need to see some in order to get that to feather in and blend away, right, but we want to sort of avoid along this seam here. So when we're sanding, if we want to get close to that edge, we can use a smaller tool and get in close to that edge and work that area without sort of going over that edge too much. And then we are going to put another fill coat on the whole thing, so all this area, all the shiny spots that appear here, those will get buried again. Then we'll do another, the heavy sanding, this is the heaviest sanding we're, we're really trying to level things out. We'll do another fill coat, won't be quite as thick as this one may have been, but still a pretty good fill coat, and then we'll go and sort of assume that the surface is then level right.

Now we're doing the sanding making, you know, trying to make a nice clean place to varnish. Oh, after the next fill coat, okay, right, right. So, you know, the presumption being we've mostly leveled things out, some of the, we might still have some places here, there was a fairly deep place that fill coat didn't get, there maybe there was a hair, you know, a brush bristle there or something right, but we've basically gotten this area here pretty flat. You know, there's some, a little bit of shine here, very sanded here, very sanded here, lots of gloss here, but under another fill coat, that should really be quite level, yeah, and then we can come back with sort of finer sanding. We'll always want to be careful around the edges, right, and I will always do the edges with hand sanding and with sort of fine grit sandpaper, yeah, okay. So you're not going at it with 60 or 40 on those edges; you're, what do you use? 100, 120? Yeah, something like that at that point. Any sort of high spot that shows up here, 120 will take it down because, you know, it's, it's a concentrated high spot. Where if we're trying to get rid of this large high spot here, doing that with 120 grit, take forever, sure, and in the process, you're tilting your hand, the 60 grit knocks down those high spots really quickly. You know, that took some effort to just do the side of the boat, sure, but it wasn't that big of a deal with the 60 grit, it went pretty quickly. I don't know, we didn't spend 20 minutes doing the side of it, it wasn't that long. So let's, there's a couple other things just to pay attention to. So another place where it's often an issue is these puzzle joints. If we didn't get them glued perfectly flat to begin with, so you see here, shiny spot, well sanded, we're seeing the weave in here, and the tips tend to be the most likely to sand through. They tend to be the highest. I don't think we have yet, but we're definitely hitting that glass there.

We really don't want to sand this area anymore, even though we've got some shiny spots around here. We can't sand further without damaging that glass, so this is the point to where you say, ah, I've gone as far as I can go, this right here. Yeah, you know, you might want to stop before that, a little before that, yeah, but don't want to go past that, yeah, the texture here won't change too much from when you first hit it until it's gone, oh, it's quick, huh? It's fairly quick, and but it doesn't also change that much as you're cutting through the layers. It doesn't get more pronounced, oh, in the middle, so you really don't know where you are as far as the glass goes just by seeing the weave, you know? Right in here we're just starting to see, see the tops of the weave right, in here, we're sort of seeing more weave everywhere. Yeah, you know, when we're just starting to hit the tag, the tops, you might just see a little spot, okay, and that's what you're looking for, that's the indicator, yeah, yeah, okay.

Um, all right, that's good. Yeah, so little spots right in this area, well into it here. If you start to see little spots again, you're probably almost through, oh, okay, but I don't think that's what's going on here. If you saw weave, saw weave, and then no weave, you're, you're done it, yeah, yeah. If you ended up sanding through this little spot here, best practice would be to patch that with a new piece of glass and then fill coat it and sand it smooth right, but if you're lazy, the boat's not going to fall apart because you sanded that one little spot, but this is also probably the spot you want to be most particular about because of the puzzle, right, structurally there's something going on here right, so you do want reinforcement there, but you know, stuff smaller than like a dime, you know, as long as it's not all over the place, yeah, you're probably fine, you know? If you start getting something the size of your hand, that's a problem, you, you got to fix that.  

Sort of the more annoying problem here is if you sand through the glass, you're going to hit the stain almost immediately, and once you hit the stain, the stain will disappear, and you'll want to patch up that stain just for the aesthetic. So it has to be more and more steps the further you stand and through, yeah, yeah. The solution to this problem here is day one, make sure that puzzle joint is really flat as nice as you can get it, yeah, yeah, and that's hard to know on day one, right, but you know, I think I mentioned it day one that we want to get these really flat, and this is why, yeah. You can hardly feel anything there at this point, you know, if you can feel a jump with your finger at all, then you'll probably see it when it comes time to sand it, okay? If you get your puzzle joints nice and flat, down the road, you're going to have an easier time sanding, yeah, yeah. Day one, you're all excited, it's going together; you're happy about it, you know? If you get it at all, you think, wow, isn't that so cool? But a thing to think about.

How's it look? Okay, I think, yeah, there's a spot, high spot, anything you noticed doing this side? What I did notice was, was, you know, we were talking about the edge on the other side, and sometimes you think you should be sanding it more because you do see that shiny spot, but what you realize is that it's beveled away, right? Yeah, going into the corner, and like you say, no matter how much you sand it, all you're going to do is get into cloth, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we're, we're trying for a flat surface here, a flat surface here, and you know, we've done a good job of leaving the gloss along the chines. We're going to leave the gloss along the sheer line as well, and now we're just going to flip it over, do the same thing to the deck, okay, okay.

So we finished up the hull, sanded that out as far as we need to, took a little break for lunch, now we're going to do the same thing to the deck. We have a couple places on the deck where we've got some glass to trim off, there's a couple more around the cockpit, and so here we have a couple places where we hadn't gotten glass before, and then some patches, remember we had sanded through to the wood there, so we'll just trim this back flush, but this will leave some sort of major bumps that we want to knock off flush. But again, the rasp in this situation, we've got a big drip here, bring that right down, even that out, and material here.

We don't need to get it perfect again. We are going to do another fill coat over everything here, but starting to feather that in is good. On the sides again, with a stiff thing like a rasp, we can lay it right on the surface there and get it to go flush. Yeah, that works well, yeah.

Um, and just get it pretty close, and it doesn't take too much to get that knocked down, being a little bit aggressive with it, yeah, much better than sandpaper, yeah. Since this is stiff, it only hits the high spots, and you know, the high spots, you know it's safe to do the high spots because they're high. You're not going to hit anything right away because it's a high spot.

Up here at the tip, we have a little place where there's some drips. When the boat was upside down...

Nice, all right, we, we have some big wide surfaces here where the big fairing long board will work great, and then the side panels here, some can be used with that long board, but the as they get narrower, we'll probably want to go to the smaller hand block.

Oh, you're actually through, I think so, yeah, yeah, all right, oops, sorry.

So we've got the skeg slot here, skeg control slot, with a little bit of glass hanging over the edge. We can trim most of that glass back. This is a little needle file here, actually a needle rasp, I guess technically, and work some of those edges, just some drips and such, can sort of work away at those a little bit. Is that working okay? Yeah, I guess you got to get the drips on here or that little thing won't slide up and down, control knob, I guess is that what you call it? Yeah, lack of a better word, okay. I think that's good, okay, good, okay.

So that's the first pass, and again, we were just leveling it, trying to get the high spots down, and you still see there's some shiny spots, yep. And this sanding is kind of the easy sanding, the next one will be more meticulous, okay, but at this point, we're just about ready to do another fill coat, okay? But we still have shiny spots right, so I would like to get them sort of de-glossed. So I have here some Scotch-Brite pads. I got these through that company named after a river, I think you know. You can get stuff like this as a grocery store, the color makes a difference as far as what grit it is, but it doesn't really make a difference for our questions here, but basically we just want to go over the whole thing and find the shiny spots and make them so they're not shiny anymore, okay?

It's not going to make them completely dull, but it should scratch them up a little bit. So we're going over the whole thing, and this is our chance to get the shines and the shiny bits on the corners. Your, we just hit it over bottom. All right, I think it's good here, very light. All right, now I'll just vacuum off some of the dust.

Okay, looks good. Last thing I want to do is just sort of give it a wipe down, get rid of any remaining dust. This is just denatured alcohol, and if there's any contaminants, that you know, the boat's been sitting around for weeks, so if, you know, spider poop or anything landed on it. So also gives us a chance to see other flaws. If there's any scratches that you're worried about, are they going to be visible? Wiping it down with denatured alcohol will make it look like what it'll look like with a fresh coat of epoxy on it. So if a scratch disappears with the alcohol, it's not going to show up after the epoxy.

Really is quite flat, yeah. You know, that seemed like a fairly basic process, you know, what's that going to accomplish? That's what we did, did right there, I think, adds a huge amount to the final finish of the boat. It'll straighten out the reflections and make the reflections more clear, gives it that mirror finish in the end, yeah, right? The fill coat will then fill in any of the remaining flaws a bit, then we'll do a final sanding, and the final sanding matters too, but really all the final sanding is doing is getting rid of sort of the remaining roughness, and then after the final sanding is the varnish, yep, yeah.

Yeah, you know, we've done 60 grit, yep. The fill coat will fill in all the 60 grit scratches right, so if you did a really great job of leveling it with this sanding, yep, the fill coat might, you might be able to start at 120, uhhuh, for the sanding right, probably have to start at 80, but you know, with a really good job in the leveling, sort of all that's left is getting rid of brush marks and that sort of thing. And the thing to remember with any sanding, it's the first sanding that does most of the work. All the sanding after that is getting rid of the scratch marks from the prior sanding right, finer and finer, yeah, you know, right? So you, you're not till you're polishing right, so you know, if you're trying to get the surface nice and even and smooth, it's the first sanding that matters, yeah. That first sanding is critical, yeah.

This, this is really the one that matters, the, how's it look? I think it looks great, you know? I think we might, you know, there's still some places where the overlaps of tape leave a little bit of a high spot, and there were the occasional low spots where the puzzle joints were a little bit out of line, but those will somewhat, yeah, the next fill coat will raise some of the low spots, and then the sanding will lower the some of the high spots, and hopefully they'll come to an agreement.  And so I think we're in good shape here.

When when we've done the fill coats before, we've had the boat in this orientation. Where did you find you had to do the most sanding on the sides? On the sides, so gravity was draining the epoxy off the sides and leaving partially filled cloth, and you know, you have the drips and stuff that you had to sand out, and and the bottom and the top are almost perfect already, relatively smooth, yeah. So to sort of get the benefit of that in the next fill coat, we'll orient it like this, that way, these panels here are a little bit closer to level, and so they'll build up a little bit more epoxy, and what used to be horizontal surfaces will become vertical surfaces and won't need as much. So we'll just sort of make a vertical surface here that we can lean the boat against. We don't want them in the way of where we're going to be doing the epoxy work.

So when we did the fill coat on the deck, we put the masking tape and couple inches down from the shear line, and that was sort of our transition from fill coat to no fill coat. If we just painted epoxy on right now as a fill coat, we'd and end up with a bunch of stag tights or mights or whichever they are when they're hanging down, hanging off the edge. So we want to sort of designate a separation line between what's being fill coated now and what's going to be fill coated later.

We'll do the fill coat in a couple steps. We'll be doing the one side now, you and I will be doing it, and then I'll probably do the other side later on. We'll do the big area here first, so we'll make the part line right along the shear line or right along the this separation on the deck. So I'm just going 16th of an inch, couple millimeters down from that line there, and you'll probably pull the tape off before it dries, that's my plan, whether or not I do it. Again, we want to have a little drip edge on this so it doesn't just keep on running across the tape down onto the surface beyond, and then we'll keep on going all the way around along the keel line. Oh, I see what you're doing, and again, we want to lift that bottom edge so it doesn't just keep on running across the the bottom of the boat like that, I guess. So we are ready to do a fill coat on this.  

And I forget if I've talked about this before in the series, these cheap chip brushes we call them, but these bristles come out. So to reduce number of times that happens a little bit, that's inevitable, but I've got the sticky side out here, so and yeah, you see the hairs on there, look at that, each one of those would be sort of a dam on the epoxy. And then when I get bored with that, I take super glue and I put it right along the top edge of the ferrule here and hopefully glue in the rest of the bristles. Next we will mix up some epoxy, just standard mix, nothing special about it. I'm doing something in this process that sort of disagrees with a lot of conventional wisdom about putting on a bunch of thin coats instead of one big heavy coat. I like a big heavy coat, you do. I do, okay. I'm trying to fill the weave here. I'm going to be sanding right, you know, so that 60 grit took down big spots really quickly, why? And so I want to get a good build of epoxy on this, so this is one instance where a lot of thin coats isn't as good as a fat coat. Your mileage may vary, but I want to show you my process. This is the same process I use for varnishing, so this is practice for varnishing. Oh, you use a lot of varnish too? I put on the varnish relatively thick, you, it's not super thick, but the, the my process here and how I go about doing it, how I go about applying it, I think is even if you're putting on thin coats, we want to do the same thing.

And so I do what I, what I call distributing it, leveling it, and tipping it off. So I get a brush full of res-, of resin here, and I slop it on the inside of the bucket so it's no longer dripping, but just got a lot of epoxy on, yep. And now I apply it, so I, I distribute it on the surface, and then when I start to run out, I dip in for a little bit more, all right? So now I've got epoxy where I want it. I'm working on about a 1-foot section here, then I level it with, so the first strokes were lengthwise, why? The next strokes are cross or vertical, yep, and then I tip it off again lengthwise. So the, the applying it, I'm putting it on with heavy strokes. I'm bending the bristles, I'm trying to get epoxy out of the brush onto the boat, mhm, and it's fairly heavy.

And right now I'm going to, it's going to be hard for me to reach this side, so I'm just going to stop at that top edge. So I've done horizontal strokes or lengthwise, now I'm going to do vertical strokes, yeah, not quite as much pressure, and then I'm going to go from dry towards wet with tipping strokes, which is just barely touching the surface to get rid of the brush marks. I want to come down all the way to the tape, yep, so I'd like to get it wet onto the tape, okay? Then I go on and I do the next step, so one foot section, we've got stitch holes here to help guide us all the way down to the tape, and I'm going to get some around the the riser part of the recess. I don't need any on the flat here, it'll probably end up with some drips there, but again, horizontal to start and vertical to level it out, and then horizontal to tip it off.

And notice I didn't go across this edge right, you want to drain your brush on right? If I drag across that brush, that edge, I'm doing the same thing as dragging across the top of my cup, why? I'm going to go from corner to corner and then not go across that edge, and then I'll move down another foot or so. This will probably end up up with some drips hanging off this edge since it's overhanging a bit, it's leaned far enough that it shouldn't drip inside the boat. Distribute it with horizontal strokes, I want to get down here with the epoxy. You don't need to move that fast, I'm moving fairly fast, but part of it is practice for varnish. With the varnish, you want to move pretty quickly. You want to maintain the wet edge, and so if you're taking more than like 30 seconds per 1-foot section, you're going to have a rough finish just because you're not maintaining that wet edge. You can start to mix them up, you think you get the picture of the process here?

I think I do, so again, I'm not brushing across an edge.  

So each pass you go a little bit lighter with the brush, okay? My experience is if you get a nice even thickness of material on, uhhuh, it might, gravity might move it, but it moves it in a nice even sheet, okay? Or if you have a puddle someplace, that will create a sag and make a, a drip or some unevenness, you know, harder to deal with unevenness. So this process of the three passes, we're really trying to get it all uniform thickness over that whole area, okay? And that way, you know, gravity will still do its thing, but hopefully it'll come down in a nice even sheet and not end up with drips.

Almost put it on without stirring it. Wouldn't be the first time that mistake has been made. So one thing that you can do to make for a clear layup is a quick torching to pop bubbles.  

Not a requirement, but it's kind of fun. I was going to say that it looks like fun.

So that's it for today. I will probably, we'll see timing, I'll either get another fill coat on on the other side later this evening or tomorrow morning. I think it looks a lot better now than it did this morning. I, what do you think? Yeah, it's nice and smooth now, and yeah, it's coming along, it's looking... So that leveling makes a big difference, you know? It seems like, oh, you know, we put another fill coat on, now we got to sand again and go through whole another process of sanding, but really, this, this is, I think, eliminating sanding steps by using a fill coat because we're getting rid of a lot of the scratches from this, from what we did today in this fill coat. And now it's just taking care of whatever remaining high spots there are and going on to finish sanding.

I think it looks great. So how, how many fill coats did you, will we have done in total after each fiberglassing? I did one fill coat, okay, so this is essentially the second fill coat, second, and we'll do one more, maybe, maybe not, oh, okay. You, we might be able to sand it smooth if we can sand this down so there's no glossy spots and we're not hitting the glass, yep, then we're done, yeah, then so then is up through the grits, yep, until there's no sanding scratches left anymore, right? So I'm not sure what the next big project we have is. I think really it's that finished sanding and the first coat of varnish, really, wow, we're almost here, yeah. And then after that, you know, it's however many coats of varnish we have the patience for, okay, um, and then outfitting right, so that's done after the varnishing. I do it after the varnishing, it can be done, but like putting the combing rings on, if once they're on, it's harder to varnish because you got to worry about getting a varnish on the combing rings, okay, yeah.

You know, deck lines and so forth, I obviously want to do afterwards. With the sanding, the finished sanding and varnishing, you know, that's probably one episode, and it's, you know, that's a fairly big day for the finish sanding and one coat of varnish, okay? Then it's a bunch of short little days of getting more coats of varnish on, right? And then another, I guess the next big day is just the final outfitting, just the, yeah, yeah, so seats and lines and, yeah, bulkheads are sort of the trickiest thing we have left, okay.

So if you're interested in all of that, you know, if you've stuck around this long in this video, it's not the most exciting thing, but but you must be into it. So if you're into it so much that you've stuck around this far, please hit subscribe, turn on notifications, like, share, all that fun stuff. If you're really into this, Patreon, you can directly support the production of these videos, I appreciate that you've lasted this long, that helps a lot. So until the next episode, thanks for watching and happy paddling.