Winter 2004-05

A Plan of Attack

After consideration of the problem, I decided that the best way to deal with flaking gelcoat was to simply encapsulate it. The "traditional" approach to this sort of situation is to open up each crack with a grinder and then to individually fill each one with fairing compound. But given the extent of the crazing that I faced, this didn't seem to be a viable option. Another way to deal with things would have been to grind all of the gelcoat off the boat entirely, but this would not only require a superhuman grinding effort, but would then require incredible amounts of fairing and surfacing work in order to prepare the deck surface for paint. After much consideration I decided to encapsulate the old gelcoat under a layer of light fiberglass cloth. The hope was that this would not only provide a nice surface for new paint, but would also minimize or even prevent print-through of the gelcoat crazing.

Grind, Grind, Grind, Vacuum, Grind

The first step was to grind the old non-skid texture off the boat. I wanted to have a reasonably smooth surface for laying down the new glass to promote good adhesion and minimize problems with air bubbles. This step was far more difficult that I had imagined before I started. At some point in the past, a previous owner had awlgripped the decks. Between the rough texture of the nonskid pattern and the incredibly tenacious awlgrip surface, grinding proceeded very slowly, eating up an incredible amount of time and 40 grit sanding discs.

The grinding revealed a number of lovely colors as I worked through the light grey Awlgrip and golden primer, revealing a horrifiying sea-foam green gelcoat color, which made me a little sea-sick just to look at it. The entire initial grinding process took a bit over 7 hours, which I completed in one awful grinding marathon one evening. The mess was beyond description.

A Few Minor Issues

At this point I took the time to take care of a few minor issues that I needed to deal with before I could proceed. One of those issues was to fill the old hole left the cockpit-access to the old icebox which we had replaced with a super-insulated box. I filled this opening by grinding a hefty bevel and then laying in six layers of heavy biaxial fabric, temporarily supported from below by a sheet of plastic wrapped plywood.

Additionally, we wanted to reinforce the cockpit sole. To do this, I set a single layer of 3/8 inch meranti plywood in thickened epoxy. Since Tim had numerous scraps around the shop, I was able to piece this together from 3 smaller sections. I planned to cover this with a couple of layers of cloth when we glassed the boat. Note that this photo was taken after adding the cloth, but it gives the sense of how the ply was pieced together.

Spot Fill

The next step was to mix up a batch of fairing compound and fill the areas where the gelcoat had chipped away. The inital grinding had knocked loose some additonal gelcoat as well. The worst areas in this regard were on the starboard side deck, but I was amazed at how bad this problem was overall. It's amazing how easy it is to overlook these cosmetic problems after you've been living with them for a while.

After applying the spot filler I had to grind these areas smooth, which I did using the DA and 40 grit paper. I found that I had some areas which needed another application, which meant another round of grinding, too. Already the grinding was beginning to grow old. But at this point I was ready to go ahead and lay on the encapsulation glass. Click here for another view showing the condition of the decks after spot-filling.

At this point I also took the time to so some substantial filling and fairing of the old access hatch opening. While I had already glassed that area in, the glass was a bit sunken with respect to the surround level and it required quite a bit of fairing compound to bring it up level with the surrounding cockpit seat. I didn't worry about getting it perfect, but I did want it to be relatively flush and smooth. This required a couple of applications of compound.

Section, Measure, Template, and Cut

I had decided to use a single layer of 10oz finishing cloth to encapsulate the old gelcoat. Tim was also planning to use a light-weight finishing cloth as part of glassing regime for the decks of his daysailor so we split a full roll of the cloth. Sadly, I seem to have misplaced all of my photos from the templating and cutting of the glass. Sorry!

The procedure was pretty simple. First I sectioned out the boat, drawing a centerline down the boat. I then measured back the width of the cloth, drawing lines across the boat perpendicular to the centerline. It was rather odd to be drawing lines and notations directly on the deck of the boat using a SharpieTM marker. I then cut pieces of cloth to fit the areas. I cut the pieces so that they would butt together, but not overlap, and so that they would cover the flat toerail area. I labeled each section on deck, and marked each corresponding piece of glass, then carefully folded them up and put them aside.

Epoxy and Glass Marathon

I had helped Tim with the glassing of the daysailor decks a few days before, so I roped Tim into returning the favor. Tim got materials spread out and ready and set up some temporary staging while I vacuumed the boat and wiped down with acetone. Once the boat was cleaned up we donned stylish Tyvek pants and got ready to roll.

We quickly fell into the routine of it all, and things proceeded quite smoothly. We did find that we needed to work quickly, as the System Three resin with the fast hardener didn't have a very long pot life (to be expected, of course), but we found that if we got it out of the pot quickly and spread it out we would have a pretty reasonable working time to get the glass rolled out before the resin became too sticky to work with. It was interesting that the resin would be fine and then all of a sudden it would reach the tack point. Sometimes I would be rolling along and right in the middle of a stroke it would tack up.

Procedure was basically to lay the dry piece of glass onto the deck then pour the resin on top, spreading it out with a squeege. As the resin soaked in, we would then roll it out with air rollers, paying special attention to the various curves and fillets. Once the bulk of the rolling was done, one of us would mix up a fresh pot and get started on the next section while the other finished up the rolling out of the previous piece.

I was very pleased with the way the conformed to some of the compound curves on the forward and aft ends of the cabin trunk. Only in 2 or 3 places did we have to make relief cuts to get the glass to lay down! It took about 6 and a half hours to finish the whole process, with only one 15 minute break during the procedure. By the end we were getting pretty punchy, and some rather inappropriate "shop jokes" were born. Click here for another view of the boat after glassing was finished.