Coating with Graphite

After getting the fiberglass glued down, I went back and added two more coats of epoxy with a foam roller and chip brush. Next I wanted to coat the keels and skegs with a few coats of graphite. Graphite gives a slippery surface that is supposed to be good at taking bumps. I wanted to give it a try instead of paint.

But! My red-green color-blindess led me to grab the wrong bag of filler out of a dark cabinet. I grabbed the purple phenolic micro-balloons instead of the black graphite. And I didn’t notice until I had already coated both keels!! Thinking it was graphite, I mixed 10% by volume with the epoxy. That led to a really thin mixture that sagged and ran and made a mess! I sanded the sags off as much as possible, but actually had to make a fairing mix with the micro-balloons and do a couple of rounds of fairing and sanding. It was a good opportunity to fair in the fiberglass overlap edges.

After that mess was cleared up, covering with graphite was easy. I mixed at 10% by volume and rolled on 3 coats.