Some of you may have followed my other post Intake/inlet project from a few months back.  I've made a couple more of these pieces, from plugs, and am still very disappointed with the cosmesis.   It looks decent from 3 feet away, but if you carefully inspect, the flaws are evident.



After the final layer of carbon fiber, I'm putting down about 4-5 coats of resin (Marine 820 system).  On my initial piece, I had no clue about degassing - so I was just mixing it and painting it on.  But for this piece, I've degassed in a proper vacuum chamber for about 7 minutes and the difference is obvious now - zero bubbles.  I'm using cheap "chip brushes" to gently coat the piece (disposing after use).  

After those 4-5 layers I have a fairly glossy and nice looking top coat, albeit very uneven as I don't have any system to rotate the piece while it dries for even resin distribution.  There aren't any visible defects/imperfections at this point, just the very uneven surface.


So then it's on to wet sanding.  I'm using a Porter Cable random orbital (thankfully not by hand!!) with a 3" pad and 3" discs, starting at 400 progressing to 1500 grit.  Here's what I'm left with after an hour of wet sanding.  It actually seems to look worse the 'deeper' and longer I go wet sanding. 


The smaller, pinhead sized dots seem to vanish for the most part when the piece is wet - as I do notice that when coating with another layer of resin (or wetting the piece) - a LOT of these imperfections vanish.  But it just seems like there's room for improvement with my process.  Anyone with thoughts on where to improve?  Thanks much.