When we last checked in on Undecided, she was unceremoniously disassembled and getting rough sanded on her bottoms. Sounds painful eh? Since then, she’s had her bottoms sprayed with gelcoat. When gelcoat goes on, it’s very rough. Its typically called “orange peel” but it feels much like an aluminum piece thats been powder coated. Sure its smooth, but its got a texture to it that vastly increases the surface area of the bottom of the hull, and makes the boat SLOW. A very painful process of wetsanding then buffing and polishing has to be done to the hulls to make them smooth and glossy and FAST.
Yesterday, Bailey and Brett (TVS4) came up to my humble home and we gave Undecided the hull finish she deserves. We started with a 320 grit wetsand (the rain helped with this task quite a bit), then moved to a 400, 600, 800, then a 1000 grit rub down. After that we moved the hulls to the garage where we hit them with a rubbing compound under power buffers. Then a 3M finesse polish which really made the hulls stand out. Then finally, we buffed in the McLube Hullcote (courtesy of our 2009 Sponsor). This final step made the gloss really pop, as you can see in the picture below. We’ll be putting all this hard work to the test down in Pensacola this weekend at Performance Midwinter’s racing against 15 other Nacra 20′s.
Where did I put my sunglasses, there's a glare in here!