Drumler

Now this is where things started to go wrong…

Now that I have a boat, the pressure is off the family on choosing Birthday and Christmas presents for the foreseeable future…  My beautiful blue grey green-eyed girl (ie the wife), gave me two excellent gadgets to help the winter refurb:  First of all, for my birthday, a  Makita Sander/Polisher.  Here it is:

Makita Sander/Polisher

Great tool: can’t fault it.   Unfortunately, I also didn’t have a clue how to use it.  I have now learned three things:

1) You need to spend a lot longer on the sanding stage than I did on the port side;

2) You need to wield the Makita much more gently than I did on the starboard side;

3) You need to spend even longer on the sanding stage than I did on the starboard side.

Otherwise you’ll end up with the same result that I did:

On the Port side, a rough, uneven painted surface – which didn’t really become apparent until I had put the primer coats on.   Basically, very thin residual layers of primer/undercoat, which seem pretty invisible against the bare wood, show up a lot more clearly than you would imaging when the wood has been re-painted.

On the Starboard side, having seen the error of my ways on the port topsides, I resolved to do things properly, and so spent about double the time sanding than I had done before, taking care to get all the residual undercoat off.

Result: a nice smooth hull, other than the numerous small circular gauge marks the circular sander seems to have left in the wood.  Aaaargghh!…

In retrospect, I should have taken it much more slowly, and been more gentle with the sander, with finer sandpaper.

Well, you live and learn, and there is no way I have the time to start again now, so I’ll just have to do the best I can this year and tackle it next year.

The one upside:  at least I’ll know what to do next year!