A great polishing technique for those hard to reach places.

[caguy]

I don't have a lot of patience for polishing and finishing so I was planning on painting the bottom of the boat liner. The boat was submerged for what must have been a year before I bought it. The gelcoat was stained deeply with a green tinge. I tried bleach, 409 and cleanser. Nothing got rid of the stain. I was installing the doors this weekend and decided to paint them before mounting them. I decided to sand them down to get rid of the gloss. I noticed that the stain disappeared after sanding with 120 grit paper on my Multimate tool. I remembered that others had done the same so I stepped down to 240 and finally 600 grit. All was gong well and it just needed a compound rub out and polish.
Polishing in that small of an area and in all of those crevices could not be done with the polisher and as stated I have not tolerance for hand rubbing.
That's when it occurred to me to attach the microfiber rag to the Multimate pad. The pad has hooks that grab the microfiber towel. With a daub of compound I applied with the Multimate. It worked like a charm. I was able to get into all of the corners and crevices. That section was done in less than 10 minutes. You an see the comparison with the the section that was just sanded with the 120.
This will especially be handy when polishing the cockpit and deck. I am actually looking forward to that job now.

 

[whatfiero]

polishing

thanks for the tip defiantly gonna try it It sure is nice to shine an old boat up and show up at one of those swanky yacht clubs

 

[Tim R.]

Not sure how aggressive a cotton microfiber could be but you could cut up a 3M wool hook and loop pad and attach it to your Fein.

 

[Timo42]

Frank, you know where my boat is parked and you have all summer...

 

[caguy]

Not sure how aggressive a cotton microfiber could be but you could cut up a 3M wool hook and loop pad and attach it to your Fein.

What ever you use it has to be thin enough that the machine doesn't vibrate back and forth while the pad just sits there. I'll try different pads but at he tiime I had the microfiber laying there. I was amazed at how quickly it did cut. I am not proposing to do the whole boat that way but in the edges and corner that can not be reached it should work well.

 

[Benny17441]

Re: A great polishing technique for those hard to reach plac

For years I have been using sandpaper to remove that chalkie oxidation from the fiberglass but prefer the 1000 grit to preserve the gel coat. I could see that for stain removal a deeper peel may be required but would not recomend using a coarser grit than the minimum required for the job. If you think about it, polishing and rubbing compounds work on the same principle of abbrassion as does sandpaper. I always say "let the lazy guy do the job as he will find out the easiest way to do it".

 

[caguy]

Re: A great polishing technique for those hard to reach plac

This stain was pretty deep. 1000 grit paper would have taken forever. By stepping down from 120 to 240 to 600 worked for me. I tried polishing with a polishing pad that is made for the Multimax and it worked great, much faster than the microfirber.