Gelcoat Chip Repair
Repairing cracks, scratches, and dings in gelcoat is a fairly straightforward matter, and it can make your boat look years younger. Diablo 2 Lvl 99 Chars Download Youtube on this page. Last month I detailed methods of restoring the shine to dull and faded gelcoat in. Unfortunately, a loss of gloss is not the only damage fiberglass sustains.
After hitting a rock in the lake last summer, we perform cosmetic repair to the Fiberglass Gel Coat on the. Nov 22, 2017 - If fiberglass gelcoat is damaged, dinged or chipped, it's going to throw off a smooth exterior. Here's how to repair gelcoat chips in no time. Help repairing a small Gelcoat chip. Get a gelcoat repair kit. I just used a kit from evercoat to fix a chip in a bay boat. Find great deals on eBay for gelcoat chip repair. Shop with confidence.
Everyone who has ever taken a boat to a dock knows that scratches are a risk. Gelcoat can also crack like plaster or craze like porcelain. In some cases it evens flakes off like bad paint. Fortunately, all of these conditions can be repaired.
Scratch Repair The most basic repair to gelcoat is filling a scratch. If you can do this successfully, you are well armed to make all other gelcoat repairs. Scratches are repaired by filling them with fresh gelcoat. Except for color matching, the process is as straightforward as it sounds. You cannot repair a scratch with gelcoat resin anymore than you could repair it with paint.
To fill the scratch you need a thickened form of gelcoat, called paste. Scratch-repair kits containing a small amount of gelcoat paste and hardener along with a selection of pigments are widely available for less than $20. When it comes to matching gelcoat colors, white is the easiest shade to work with. Color Matching Even professionals who do gelcoat repairs daily can have difficulty getting a perfect color match.
Condition yourself to be content with a self-assessment of 'not bad.' You can buy gelcoat paste in 'factory' colors instead of using a kit that requires you to mix the color using supplied pigments—but if your boat has spent a few years in the sun, even factory colors won't match exactly. The solution is an adjusting kit— a selection of pigments. For small repairs to white boats, the generic kit is probably just as good.
Color matching is much easier with white, and once the repair is buffed out to a gloss, small shading differences will be unnoticeable. Matching colored hulls is more difficult. A house-paint color-sample card that closely matches your hull can provide valuable help. The paint-store custom mixes the color by adding tints to a white base, so ask the clerk for the formula. It may call for a half-dozen different tints, but the important ones are those specified in the largest quantities.
Use the tints in your kit to approximate the formula. Put exactly one ounce of paste into a mixing cup and add tints a drop at a time. Keep track of the number of drops of each tint.