Swings and Roundabouts.

A lot of owners on the forum recommend sandblasting keels but the amount of damage i did just with a de-scaler proved that had i gone down the blasting route there would be nothing left to bolt back on the boat.

Also the fact that both keels would be encapsulated in epoxy resin made me confident of halting any further corrosion and would effectively form a barrier between the sea and iron of the keel, from this point of view you can see my logic in not becoming obsessed with losing every bit of corroded metal.

It was now a case of filling and fairing the keel into some kind of profile that resembled the old shape, for this i chose to (on top of the 3 layers of POR15) do two barrier coats of plain west system epoxy resin with black pigment in it and then using a combination of low density filler (pinky/purple colour) and high density filler (white) began to shape the keel.

Tools for the job were a plasterers hawk and trowel plus a pad sander and various grades of sandpaper (40, 80 120) all from screwfix. Also a decent 3M mask with fine filters, measuring cups for epoxy and blue nitrile (chemical resistant) rubber gloves.

To be honest it was a bloody laborious task largely because i started this last winter (2008) so the epoxy was taking forever to cure even with four infra red heaters on 24 hours, but it was worth it.