: I'm
: getting close to glassing and I'm wondering if I need to put down a seal
: coat first or not. It seems as if a seal coat would need to be sanded
: smooth prior to glassing. I put epoxy on the interior wood on my
: Chesapeake - no glass - and it's pretty bumpy - dust, etc.,

I needed to do a seal coat to apply graphics - if you just epoxy in the area
where the tracing paper is applied then the edges of the area you epoxied
show up badly. My seal coat got the sort of less-than-perfectly-smooth
surface you describe, partly through dust in the air, and partly through
raising a little grain in the wood. Unless the sticky-up bits are large,
they probably don't matter, and the glass is certainly easier to wet out
if there is a seal coat on first. If you need to do any filling with fairing
putty between strips, then applying a sealer coat over the whole area
immediately afterwards also makes the filling less obvious.

If you glass as soon as the epoxy is touch dry (ie. as soon as you can
actually lay the glass out without it sticking) then you can't really sand.
If you have a rough enough texture that you feel obliged to sand then you need
to wait long enough for the seal coat to cure pretty well, otherwise you will
just clog your sand paper with softened resin, and make a mess. If you wait for the resin to harden, sanding the sort of finish you describe really doesn't
take a lot of effort - use a fine grit and you can remove the dust specks
in half an hour. But I would only bother if the dust is coloured and shows
up. I rolled out my glass in a room with a fairly new carpet and got quite
a few bits of crimson lint on the glass. I didn't notice until wetting out
the glass, and quite a few of these red fibres were under the glass. It
looked awful ! But no-one else has ever spotted them and I have to look quite
hard to find them myself now. Your boat is to paddle - no-one will come and
inspect it with a hand-lens when you are on the water !!

Andy