Well, the sides finally stuck back together. After a week of drying!
Here are some of the long-suffering joints, with a bit of car filler to smooth them out. I would claim that all this filler was a result of the sanding sealer fiasco, were it not for the fact that this is less filler than I usually use.....
So now we sand it all down and shape it....
and following advice from wiser heads, I gave it an external coat of thinned varnish rather than more sanding sealer...!
I also tilted the superstructure front - it was vertical originally which looked, and was, completely wrong....
Once that's sanded down, I can spray an undercoat - car paint primer...
So now we fill it a bit more carefully....
And note where the spray didn't reach last time!
and we can soon see the places I missed sanding!
Or the place where I fingered it while it was still wet....
We use fine sandpaper to finish the surface. Glue a little sandpaper on a bit of balsa with impact adhesive to make an instant finishing file. You cut the balsa to the smallest of the window dimensions and you have a tool specifially adapted for the hull you are working on.
For soft balsa EeZeBilt hulls you can use coarser sandpaper as a cutting tool...
When you have sanded with fine paper the hull will be covered with a fine flour dust. Wash this off with a damp sponge with a bit of detergent, then rinse with water. Dry it fairly quickly and the balsa won't be damaged too much by the water. Then let it dry for an hour or so and it can be lightly resprayed...
It's smoother, but the grain still seems to be there....
And we can see that I still forgot some edges. A bit more sanding, filling, washing and spraying....
It's looking a bit more like a hull now. But there's still some smoothing and re-spraying to do on the edges.
