Can any one suggest a reliable intermediate approach to repainting a hull bottom that has a case of the pox with several places where it is broken thru the gel coat short of removing all the old bottom paint and then the gel coat and going back up from there. Procedures and product information would be greatly appreciated.
Bottom Referbushing
- Thread starter NavySailorII
- Start date
As usual it depends. For small blisters especially if there are few, I've had good success just scraping them out and filling them with thickened epoxy. The biggest challenge is to get rid of the moisture in the glass. Some have suggested 3 to 6 months on the hard, but where we live that would take out an entire sailing season because 3 months is our dry season. So I used a heat gun (careful to not get it too hot, a hair dryer may make more sense but I haven't tried that.) and went ahead and filled it. Next I just applied bottom paint. I haul every 2 years and it still looked okay. Our current boat only had a dozen dime size or smaller and none had cracked so I left them and repainted.
Ken
Ken
Ok so you sand out blister I use a 4" grinder with 120 grit sand pad but ya got to be carefull not to go too deep grinder sands fast and you could go all the way thru boat in 2 min taper sanding 4" all the way around blister for an 8 to 12" circle . Get some biaxel mat and west epoxy works fine but polyester resian better and paper cups and cheep 2" paint brushes cut a quarter size patch then half dollar then bigger then bigger and build up spot till flush with hull it will take several days with several applications until one day ya rub your Han across to feel slight hump then sand that out flat seal with an epoxy paint like 3m e 2000. Bottom paint and ya done