Starting to finish the rudder and centerboard

There has been a lot of time sanding and fairing the rudder and centerboard with micro balloons. Frankly, I'm getting sick of it.

I tried creating many thnk laters of micro balloons and I won't be doing that again. I think it's much better to slather on a thick coat and sand it later. This is tricky to do to get a smooth layer because I've been making it too thick. I think I've got a good process now.

The white stuff is micro balloons

Now that I think it's fairly smooth with micro balloons, it's time to coat it with epoxy with graphite powder in it. I picked up can of West Systems graphite powder. The graphite adds a lot of abrasion resistance.

First coat of graphite epoxy rolled on.

I was unhappy with the runs that happened down the side and around the bottom.

I had to do more sanding to get those off. Although when I got to it, it was still somewhat green, so razor blade scraping worked very well. Unfortunately, I got back down to the microballons in a few places.

I'll do one more coat, but this time, I'll hang them from the ceiling so that it won't drip like that again.

I don't think I mentioned it, but I needed to cut new pieces for the rudder spacers. When I left camp, I had only 2 of each and I'm supposed to have 4.

These are the rudder internal pieces

I had to cut the other 4 (2 of each) pieces. I had to do it with a jigsaw, and my mad jigsaw skillz need some improvement. I'll have to take some time to clean up the edges.

Again, you can see how I used the 1/4" dowels to put it all together.