: I was using regular dry sandpaper, and
: it seems to get completely gunked up almost immediately. If I were to keep
: going like this I'd probably use 30 sheets.

Buy stock in the sandpaper company!

If your sandpaper is getting filled in repaidly you could have one or more of these things going on: the resin may not be completely hard, the sandpaper is too fine (the grit is not coarse enough), or the speed of the sandpaper is too fast.

While epoxy will harden to a usable state in a day or two, it can take another week, or even several weeks for the polymerization to complete, and for the resin to become rock hard. You might wait a little lnger before going back to your sanding. Or, you could gently increase the temperature around the boat to somewhere near 40C or 100F. A couple days at those slightly raised temperatures should speed the curing process.

Fine grade sandpaper fills with soft resin. When it is used with a power sander the friction heats things up and the resin softens and glues itself onto the sandpaper. With a coarser grade of sandpaper the space between each piece of grit is greater, so you remove more material before the paper fills in, and the paper continues to ride on the cutting edge of the grit, rather than on the built-up film of melted resin.

If 60 grit sandpaper on a power sander is still clogging quicker than you like, don't go to anything coarser. Really coarse sandpaper will cut into your wood, and do great damage is very little time. Instead, use staples or thumbtacks to hold a piece of sandpaper to a scrap block of wood, and sand over the area by hand. It is not a lot of area to cover, and hand sanding gives you the most control. After you've gone over the area with your coarse paper, go to the next finest grit and make a pass over the area with that. With very light pressure there should be little material to remove now, so your sandpaper should last a bit longer.

I'd start with 80 grit, then go to 100 then 120 then 150. After doing the bulk of the smoothing iwth the coarser grades, you should have no problem using a power sander with the finer grit sandpapers.

Some people avoid sandpaper by using cabinet scrapers.

Some people just buy a lot of sandpaper and resign themselves to using it.

PGJ