Cabin Interior | Fairing & Filling

The time came to start work on the cabin interior by preparing it for paint.

The first task was to sand any rough spots and give it a good clean with the vacuum cleaner, as in this pic.

I wanted to fill all holes and fair all visible joins, so would need a fair amount of fairing compound.

I had previously tried using glass micro balloons mixed with epoxy for fairing, but you need a lot of balloons to make a small amount of filler and I wasn't that happy with the results.

What was needed was a good, ready-made filler. The kit vendor could not recommend anything, so I did some research and found this.

Made by Hempel for marine applications it can be used above and below the waterline and can be applied in layers of up to 25mm. Perfect!

You mix roughly equal amounts of dark blue fairing compound and white curing agent, and mix until it is an even light blue.

Here is some light fairing on the topsides join.

And here is the tabernacle backing plate.

I wanted to apply a small bead of fairing along all the joins in the cabin, and used a syringe to great effect.

Here is the syringe loaded with compound.

It was quick and easy to apply a bead along all the joints and seams in the cabin. I smoothed the beads out with a gloved finger. It looked good, like this.

There was really no need to extend this to the undersides of the cockpit decking, partly because it is not visible but also because that area was already very clean. When installing the decking I went to enormous lengths to make sure there was very little cleaning up to do by taping all the joints. It worked well Here is an area under the decking.

You can see that very little work is required to get ready for paint - a quick sanding along the seams before undercoat is all that is required.

I'm not looking forward to the sanding though ...