: To each his own, but I have to strongly disagree here. I asked about this
: very same problem awhile back and received what was in hindsight an
: obvious solution.

: My Problem - on an earlier boat I had filled some gaps with thickened epoxy
: before applying a seal coat. The thickened epoxy mixture soaks into the
: wood pores at a different rate than a uniform, viscous seal coat. The
: result was a splotchy looking finish on my first boat (that EVERYBODY
: notices!).

To be honest, I never attempted to apply a seal coat before filling the gaps. I just never really gave it that much thought. When I was building my first boat, the "see gap, fill gap" principle was applied. Maybe I just didn't know any better. Anyway, by the time I got done scraping and sanding, the only epoxy color was in the gaps. The only blotching came later, when I was feathering in the hull-to-deck joint, and I sanded through the epoxy in a couple of spots. Based on the results from the first boat, I'm not going to change the way I do things.

I am still skeptical about not sanding through the fill coat. Maybe I just don't do a good enough job fairing, so there are some high spots that the sander will find later.

This just shows that there is more than one way to build a boat and get good results.