No one has an opinion or comment?

Sanding will remvoe any high spots and rough up the surface for better adhesion for any cover. Green epoxy maybe an exception sine the chemicals betweent the new coat and the green prior coat will chemincally bond.

The sanding needs to be very little with a small grit sand papert, just enough to add some groves the surface being painted or glassed. It is also a good time to dust off any lose material that has accumulated on the surface.   

   Agree light sanding is all that is needed...are you using the Interlux primer?  It's great and very forgiving.

Also, if you run out of peel ply, I tried thin nylon from the fabric store and it worked OK...not as well as peel ply but pretty good...it's like rip stop nylon without the little lines every quarter inch or so.

curt

If you're painting glassed areas, you don't need the peel ply or the additional epoxy coats. Just put the glass on with only enough epoxy to properly wet it out. Once it's cured to beyond the tacky stage, fill the weave with a mixture of epoxy and phenolic microballoons. You can do it with one thick coat (but it'll be a lot more work to apply) or with 2 thinner coats.

If you're doing it with one coat, make your mixture about the consistency of canned frosting or Nutella. With 2 coats, make the first coat slightly runnier and the second coat slightly thicker.

Once you've filled the weave, sand it and fair it as usual. The sanding will be a lot easier than sanding epoxy.

After it's all sanded, you can start applying the primer and paint.

Filling the weave with unthickened epoxy is a necessary evil for varnished areas, but for painted areas it's totally unneeded. A fairing coumpound is cheaper, lighter and easier to sand. The whole process is much faster.

Have fun,

Laszlo

  Thanks everyone for the responses.  Just one question to Laszlo...Since i have a lot of peel ply, would it work just as well and save an additional one or two steps of epoxying with a mixture of epoxy and phenolic microballoons?

Both will give you a good result, but the fairing compound solution will be lighter, cheaper and faster than peel ply. Peel ply is better than no peel ply for builders who haven't learned to control epoxy thickness and drips, but then they have to learn to control peel ply. It can leave wrinkles on compound curved surfaces, wrinkles that fill with epoxy and then have to be sanded out.

Once you learn how to control your epoxy, there's very little advantage, if any, to using peel ply in a home-built single glass layer hand-layup, especially if they're not large flat surfaces.

Since you have all that peel ply for free, it can't hurt to give it a try. If nothing else, you can become the forum's peel ply expert and tell us the best way to use it.

Have fun,

Laszlo

   Peel ply will give a lighter result. Peel ply doesn't just allow more resin to be applied during the initial wetting out, but it actually acts to compress the weave to make a thinner glass/resin layer.

It'll still need a light sanding- the texture it leaves is that of the peel ply cloth, which while finer than glass weave is still too rough to accept paint.

Added care is needed to ensure good wet out and squeegee-ing of the peel ply. It isn't transparent, so voids aren't always apparent. The boat's outside is pretty easy to do, the interior not so much.