New to me toy.

[THEFERMANATOR]

Well I got reminded why I DIDN'T want a fiberglass boat. When I took the boat out a little over a month ago, I ran across a rock bar trying to get back to a beach to let my son out to play. It initially looked like I got lucky and only hit the prop and a little of the skeg, so I replaced the prop and took it out Monday. When I got home I noticed a chunk of gel coat hanging loose, looked underneath, and seen my worst fears. I gouged up about a 2 foot section of the gel coat, with about a 4 inch section down into the glass. So I have spent all afternoon sanding out the old gel coat to bevel it back to accept a new coat, cleaning up the glass, and recoating it. It would have helped if I could have found some ge coat paste because of the depth of the gouging, but all I could get was gel coat finish. So 3 coats later, I'm now ready to sand it out flat, and hopefully finish sand it. The other catch was they were out of brown AND yellow tinting, so I now have a nice WHITE section on my hull bottom. I figured it was better to have a white section, than to allow it to wear into the fiberglass. Days like today make me remember why I LIKED having an aluminum jon boat, it just scratched up the bottom and kept going, not 6 hours of fiberglass and gel work to fix.

[bradford]

Run it in Anclote river for a couple times and it will blend in lol.

[THEFERMANATOR]

Ended up on coat #4, and some water dripped out of the gel coat. Checked and a section flaked off. So sanded the spot back down, put a 500 watt flood light on it, and waiting for it to dry out fully, THEN do coat #5. I HATE FIBERGLASS WORK!

[THEFERMANATOR]

Just learned a new trick. If you get teh fiberglass good and hot with a halogen lamp. leave it on while you put the gel coat down, you can build it up in layers very quickly. I found it took about 2 minutes to skin over with the light on it, and I was able to brush on a layer, smooth it over with a flat paddle, let it skin in about 2 minutes, and repeat about 4 times before what was in my cup bagan to harden. Got the spot all taken care of it looks like, so should be good to go for Thursday.

[RidgeRunner]

Just do like I do and say F-IT. Mine spends its life on the trailer or boatlift so who needs gel anyways...