Sanding Filler

 The Thrifty Rocketeer blog continues...

A recent posting on Facebook in a rocketry group asked the assembled multitude about a product that the rocketeer had purchased.

It was a quart can of some powder called "Durham's Rock Hard Water Putty."

Now, I admit right up front that I am totally unfamiliar with this product and how it is normally used.




However, the rocketeer had been considering it as a sandable filler for spiral grooves, dings, nicks and to even-out wood grain.  His concern was that it would be too hard to sand once cured.

And that appears to be well founded.  The vast majority of responses agreed and warned against using the product in this manner.

I know there are a lot of differing products for this application that have differing degrees of hardness. I've even used a few before giving up on trying to smooth my spiral grooves.


This reminds me of a mistake that I made some 25 years ago.  It became apparent that my 3 year old so had been diving into his bed, driving the steel-frame support with the door-stop stand off through the drywall. When we went to rearrange his room, it was apparent there had been a jagged  hole punched through the drywall, but not collapsing the sheet of drywall (thank goodness). 

I went home to Grampa's house where I remembered a brown paper sack of plaster mix in his tool shed that was used for patching. I grabbed it without looking closely, drove back to my house and mixed up the stuff in a bowl. It looked a bit more gray than I would have expected. I troweled it into the hole after packing that hole with crumpled newspaper. I troweled it smooth as could be. It's a good thing that I did.

 After it was dry, I discovered that I had grabbed the sack of sidewalk patch, not the plaster patch. It wouldn't sand at all, but was fortunately smooth. I painted over it and never mentioned it to anyone. The two brown paper sacks were virtually the same size, color and location.

Believe me, I tried sanding that slight rise in patch material again and again, but found I wasn't making a dent in it at all.  I can only imagine how such a hard material would have impacted a rocket.

This has been the Thrifty Rocketeer saying, "Read the label and apply as directed!"

 

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