Now that the tombstone / monument has been assembled and glued it’s time for initial sanding and filling of cracks. I did an initial sanding pass using a handheld sander and 60 grit sand paper. This let me take the shine off all the foam, and level out surfaces so things were pretty well even. The downside to using Loctite foam as the adhesive is that it sands differently than the rest of the foam. This can lead to some tearing, or random gouges in the surface. I highly recommend using a long bladed box cutter to trim excess spray foam as close as possible to the body foam. In some cases it might even be worth it to make a V cut to trim the spray foam below the surface of the body, then fill with drywall compound.
Once the surfaces were all sanded, I pulled out the “DryDex” spackling compound by DAP. I like this stuff because it starts out pink and turns white when it dries. For someone who is terminally impatient this is a big help. I’m not great at drywalling or anything but thankfully tombstones are forgiving. I filled in all the cracks and unwanted gouges in the tombstone and smoothed the areas fairly smooth with putty knifes.
After that it was time to take a break and let things dry. Patience is a virtue? Thankfully (I guess) life got in the way and I had to leave it alone for a couple of days, which forced my hand in letting it dry.
Once all the drywall compound had dried I used a 120 grit sponge sanding block to smooth down the areas I had patched. I also left lots of random “art” on the driveway from the dust, but that washed away with the next rain. 🙂
After sanding was complete, I took the shop vac and switched it to “blow” mode and gave the whole tombstone a good going over to remove as much dust as I could. I then also ran over it with a paint brush as an extra step to try to make sure the surface was as clean as possible.
Next I opened up the can of Dry Lock. For this project I’m using white, because I’m thinking I will paint it some lighter stone color and the dark grey Dry Lock doesn’t led as well to that. If you know in advance what color you are going to use you can have the white Dry Lock tinted at the hardware store and that can save a lot of time.
For something large like this painting takes multiple days, and multiple coats. As of this posting I am on coat two on the front half of the base and coat one on the front half of the top. I plan to apply a total of three coats to the entire tombstone.