After filling the small holes left after I removed the brass nails that I used to hold the strakes in place until the PVA had dried, I used P38 to fill them along with the odd couple of small splits that I caused when nailing the obechie strakes to the hull.
After sanding the filler back, the finished result looked OK, but I know that when under-coated, any small problems are much easier to see - so I painted the area with white wood primer.
This may have been a better idea if I had done it after coating the strakes with resin - but I forgot (!), and it's too late now - so I will have to stay with a conventional finish without any epoxy coating!
After recovering from my "mistake", it got me thinking.............
Back when I first started building r/c model boats in the 1960's we never used epoxy finishing coats or cloth coverings (other than nylon and dope for control-liners wings) so we painted the models (often with Humbrol or Japlac enamels without any under-coat!) and sanded and gradually built-up the paint coats to a nice finish - and that was it.
I used my r/c boats a lot and even raced my first "conventionally finished" (see above) Swordsman in the sea.......and it survived to a grand old age, and when it was finally passed-on to its new owner many years later - it was still intact.
The old Rapier that I recently restored was also "conventionally finished" by its first owner (painted straight onto wood) and as I sanded back down through various layer of paint to the original wood, I could see that it had never had any "specialist" coatings either, and although not finished particularly well, it has survived some really bad treatment before I restored it some 50 plus years later!
Having recalled these things, I reminded myself that r/c model boats have been built and finished "conventionally" for well over fifty years and have mostly survived without any of these technical finishes to help them.
Now I am happy again to stop worrying and continue to paint and finish my Swordsman with "conventional" finishes - and only use epoxy's etc when it will help me reinforce areas such as motor mounts etc - and I always used glass fibre to reinforce these areas in the past in any case - so there is nothing really new there either !
I am sure that many will produce "exhibition quality" models using all of the currently available technical finishing aids, but I am happy to get my boats "wet" and enjoy running them a little sooner and accept that my boats will not have a show winning finish - but it won't stop me enjoying them!