Eric,

For me, epoxy/microballoon mix anytime I'm fairing to paint. As you say, primer would be too thick and soft. Even high build primers are only meant to eliminate tiny pinholes and are meant to be mostly sanded off.

Looking at your pictures, you don't have to settle for a workboat finish. It would take hand sanding with blocks and long boards instead of just doing everything with an ROS (because of the need to individually sand each strake), but it would be quite possible to get a yacht finish paint job with what you have there.

The good news is that epoxy/microballoons are very easy to sand, much easier than just epoxy. The only downside is all the dust. Treat it as if it was a wood surface - start with coarse grit and work your way down to #220 changing every time the scratches from the previous grit are gone. All the heavy lifting is done with the coarse paper. The main work is establishing a flat fair surface without epoxy bumps. It's sort of like filling the weave, except instead of a fine weave you have epoxy bumps. During the coarse sanding you can decide if you need to add another layer of fairing mix. Weight will not really be a problem since a stiff mix will be mostly air trapped in light plastic held together by an epoxy binder.

Post picture when you're done,

Laszlo

Will, indeed go with the epoxy/microballons fairing compound on the interior, as suggested. In the past, I have used a fairly thick consistency on the outer hull on small patches, with great success. With the interior the way it looks in the pictures, am I to slather the whole plank length and let the longboard flatten it fair, or just spot treatments all over the place? Trying to gauge the epxy/microballon consistemcy for the job in order to not create myself more work than needed.

For the gouges in the rails (finished bright), any recommendations? Or, use same fairing compound and just live with a dalmation looking rail?

Thank you, Lazlo! Very helpful comments! I will post picture after fairing and when the paint applied.

PS: your photo did not display, athough that is perhaps an issue on my end.

Eric,

That was your picture, not mine. I linked to 8843. It showed up for a little while on multiple machines here, but the link seems to have expired. Now it only shows up on my browsers that have the image cached. The others get an error 410, indicating that the link is gone. It's a dropbox "feature".

With something that bumpy, I'd give it a light sanding before applying the mix just to identify the high spots. At that point you need to decide which highs are better knocked down before filling and do that. With that done,  fill in the lows. Then sand again to see what's still high and repeat the whole process.  Once all the lows are are filled, then switch to sanding with the long board for fairing.

As far as the gouges, if you have matching wood and want to exercise your joinery skills, you could put in a graving piece. Mr. Google can point you to many articles and videos (not necessarily boat-related) on how to do this.

Good luck,

Laszlo

Ah, yes ... I'm such a goofball. My picture, indeed.

I appreciate the pointers. I usually try to build and cleanup as I go, so that I don't need nearly this much fairing. So, this "rescue" project is a good one for me to learn new skills. It can go two ways: either it will look better when done, or worse LOL

I don't have extra matching wood, so I will patch the gouges, othewrise I may as well replace the rails and it is not worth the expense and time on this boat. 

Thank you!

Eric

   wow nice thnx for sharing