Sanding

I have not too much to blog this time. A trip to Harbor Freight resulted in the purchase of several packs of sandpaper, a hand sanding block, seven $3.50 adjustable 12" clamps, a bag of sponge brushes and a couple of plastic putty squeegies.

Following this I spent 3.5 hours of quality time sanding the sides of the two stabilizers. The 100 grit paper was pathetically slow at removing material, and wetting it didn't help - particularly since it was not wat-or-dry.

Switching to the 220 grit wet-or-dry actually did better, and certainly kept the dust from becoming airborne. Still, I resorted a couple of times to the belt sander in several areas where the resin ridges were just not wearing down rapidly enough for me.

There are a couple of spots on one stabilizer that were sanded down to wood. Ouch! Those were near the edges, so it is just more incentive to tape the edges as they will be most likely to hit things - and the extra tape will help protect them.

There were a couple of places on the edges where it looked like the resin didn't quite saturate the cloth. We'll see if the next resin and tape application will fill those spots, but it would probably be better to sand them down to the underlying resin - which I did in most of the places.

Still, after going through half of the pack of 220 grit I'm rebelling against the hand sander. An electric random or orbital sander is on my next on my list to purchase.