Fairing board

[SBTele]

Building a 17 ft sea kayak, stitch and glue. now I am at the point that I really want to fair out the hull for final painting and varnishing. Wondering what I should use for a fairing board?? Does it matter, can I just use some scrap wood?

[Buddy]

A flexible piece of plywood, say 1/4 or 3/8 thick and two handles is traditional. Size it to use some fractional width of floor sander roll sandpaper is also customary and cheaper than store bought, but you can get them all ready made from an auto body shop supply store. Use sandpaper adhesive or Super 77 spray adhesive to stick roll stock. You want this thing to be able to conform to the curve, usually along the diagonals, but sometimes a bit around the sections as well. You're trying to find and eliminate the high spots, so some stiffness is desirable.

[Steve Lansdowne]

Shouldn't be much fairing on a stitch and glue. Those are more useful for rounded hulls like strippers. Use the search function to locate the post on this topic not too long ago, complete with some pictures.

[Klaus]

Make sure it has comfortable handles if its going to be used for any length of time.
Nothing takes away the "joy" of sanding quicker than sore fingers and blisters ;)
Klaus

[Ken Hutchins]

With my background as a toolmaker and tooling engineer, and being more 'thrifty' AKA cheap :D than most, naturely I've made a couple of fairing boards. But one day I had a weak moment and just had to have a new tool, :D so I called Jamestown and got me one of those fancy ones made by 3M. It has the hook and loop stuff for holding the sand paper on. It works fantastic, they got just the right stiffness and good handles, easy to change grit size, etc. Well worth the money.

[Bruce Hooke]

As Steve said, there should not be much fairing to do on a stitch and glue boat. You can't really sand enough wood off to fair anything without starting to cut through the veneers in the plywood. What sort of fairing are you hoping to do? If you are mostly focused on cleaning up the seams then a sanding board such as others have described might well do the trick; you just might want to do something like only put sandpaper on in the areas that hit the seams so that you don't sand off too much plywood. If there are unfair areas in the plywood itself then your best bet may be to fill the low areas with epoxy thickened with a lightweight filler. Then you can use a sanding board to fair in that area, but again, be careful of the adjacent plywood...

[Buddy]

I second the praise of the 3M Stickit board and sandpaper. It's what I used on my MarshCat.