Fill That Crack In!

All is going well. Making lots of progress.

I took the tape off the upper body, and it is looking good.



Probably hard to tell from the photo, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done to match up the edges of the two halves.

The first thing I did was go in with an X-Acto blade and clean out a little trench along the main seam. You see, cured epoxy is still a tiny bit flexible. This is bad if you're trying to make the seam disappear altogether, as it will get pushed around by the sandpaper. So the thing I did here is dig out that surface exposed epoxy. That way, the only thing my sandpaper will touch is resin and putty.



Next step is to lay in the putty. I use a flat top X-Acto blade to do this. It's like a tiny spackle knife. It lets me put putty in very flat. Very small amounts. Anything that isn't in a strategic location will need to be sanded, and that's extra effort. The other danger is that while you're sanding putty, you're also sanding down resin, which is probably not something you want to do. Though I guess that depends on the circumstances. So I ran a bead of putty along the seam line of the two halvs.



Ten minutes later, it was all cured, and ready to be sanded. I went in again with my 300 grit sandpaper, and knocked the putty all the way down to the resin. Along the way, I noticed some distortion in the back ring that I'll want to go back in and fix later. Looks like the mold wasn't lying entirely flat when they poured this beast up. No big deal really, and it will allow me to document another technique for fixing resin problems.



With the putty all sanded down and it looking pretty good, it's time to nail it with another coat of primer, to get a better view of where the remaining problem areas are.



While that dries, I spent some time cleaning up the excess epoxy that got spread around during the installation of the magnet. It came off pretty easy using the tip of an X-Acto blade. Because the overflow epoxy set up on top of primer, it was fairly easy to remove with just a little nudging around. I consider this operation done.



And that's going to do it for today. I put in a lot of work today, though my blog entries aren't entirely sync'd up to reality. Some of the work I did yesterday was posted today. Not a big deal really, but in case anyone has continuity questions, they are essentially unanswerable.

In other news, as of a few hours ago, I'm officially one year older. Ugh! Today, November 18th, is my birthday. Woohoo!!! Not really sure how I feel about that, but I suspect I will survive. It's not one of those birthdays that causes one to pause and take stock of things, but it's a birthday nonetheless.