Gel Coat Repair and polishing

Its is time for another large update. I feel it has taken me forever to get the polishing and gel coat repairs done. It is a very long a tedious process, but the results are just stunning. I had never done gel coat repair before, and the first time I failed bad, but after a try or two I figured it out. I am very happy with the results, and would tackle it again in the future for sure. 

So lets get down to the details.

The first thing I had to do is get the old stickers off along with the pinstripes. I first used tracing paper to make an impression of the sticker on the bow so that I can get it reproduced. I then used a 3M eraser wheel to remove the pinstripes and any stickers left on the boat. The eraser worked really nice to remove the stripes with ease.

This is the wheel I used







I then started the sanding process. I wanted to get the sanding and one stage of polishing done so that I could see just where I needed to repair the gel coat.You want to remove just enough material to get rid of the oxidation, and no more. I started with 600 grit in most places, then 800, then, 1000, then 1500 to get rid of the 600 grit sanding scratches. The idea is to progressively get finer and finer with your grit until you have a mirror shine.

This is after the three steps of sanding. You will see it is pretty dull.. but don't panic.





Once you have finished the sanding steps, you will start with a wool buffing wheel and a fairly course compound to further get rid of the sanding scratches.



Dad tried his hand at polishing too. It is a craft you really have to practice to get right.



You can see that the shine is starting to come back now. This is only after one of the 4 or 5 polishing steps.




Now it was time for the stuff I had never done before... gel coat repair. I had several deep gouges in the grey and the black glitter, so I had to get them filled and gel coated. Plus I had sanded through a few places, and they need a re-spray.

What I did first was mix up the right color gel ( and that took forever with the grey) and then thicken it up like Peanut Butter so that I could putty the gouges. You want to leave the repair a little higher than the hull, and then once it cures you sand it level with the surface. You could polish and be done, but I wanted to bland it better. 

This was a large gouge here and this is after the filler has been added. 



These were two deep holes that I filled. You can see where I sanded through here.



Once that was done I mixed up black non waxed gel coat, thinned it with 10% Styrene thinner and sprayed it through my small detail gun. I feathered the edges out to kinda blend the black.



I then took non waxed clear gel coat and mixed in my metal flake that I found from PPG. All I was trying to do was to get a decent pattern here. The idea is to vary your spray pressure and distance to get the flak to lay in deferent ways.



The next step was to lay down a thinned out layer of non waxed black over the metal flake to dull it down a bit. By doing this it makes the flak look like it is deeper in the black, not laying right on top. It makes them shimmer differently. Over that coat i did the clear mixed with metal flake again, and that gave me my desired effect. Once that cured, I went over it with Clear gel mixed with patch booster. Patch booster is like wax, but also thins out the clear much more, and boosts the gloss a bit. This is the final layer would will be polishing. I found that is I put standard wax in the clear, it got cloudy. The patch booster fixed that.

Remember to feather your spraying farther over each coat. A one inch repair could have a 12" diameter feather out.

This is after the final clear coat. You can see that the gel coat has alot of orange peel, and that is almost unavoidable. I put down seven coats of clear, and will sand off 2 for polishing.








Once it cured for about 5 hours, I took 320 to it to level out the orange peel, and then started the other sanding and polishing procedure.

This is what it should look like. 







No more gouges or holes!

Once I had tackled that black repairs, I hit the grey areas. I had a bunch of scraps and gouges all over the place, and it took me hours to fix them all.











Here is a good shot of Dad hitting the lower side of the hull with 800 grit



After the beating of doing all the repairs, we finished up the polishing. We had already done the wool bonnet stage, so now we went over it with a yellow pad, and the same polish we used with the wool. Once that was complete we went over it with a grey foam pad and super fine polish for a really nice shine. The I stuck a coat of wax on it, stepped back and almost shed a tear. I would have never thought this poor boat could look this good.

















Here is all of the stuff that I used in the polishing of this boat. It is a sizable investment, but the results speak for themselves.



Now for all of the videos