Catalina water blisters

[Patrick Quinlan]

Does anyone know about taking of the gelcoat to repair water blisters. This has been done to the boat and repaired with Vc Tar. Is this as good as gelcoat or do we lose the strength of the hull. Do we need to recoat or touch up every year? ( My real Question- Is this the equivalent of repainting a new car... which will rust in three years or buying a new car with a 5 year warranty.) Thanks for your responses. Patrickatrick

 

[John]

blisters

It depends how deep the blisters are and how much glass was peeled off .If the boat is very wet you should peel the bad glass off and then you need to add new glass.Most DYS ers just grind the gel coat off and leave the week glass.Some times it works some times the boat will re blister .Most of the time the boat yard guys want to lay up thin glass to stop cracking and help with water proofing.my yard guy wanted 10000 dollers to do the job on a 30 foot boat.Im doing the bottom on my boat now it was barriar coated when new.I scraped the old paint, grinded the boat with 80 grit paper and now i need to roll on the barriar coat and bottom paint.It will be better then new.but my hull was dry when i started John

 

[Waffle]

the answer to your question is NO! Dran Lakers and Vc Tar /VC-17.. This stuff is only for race boats. I don't think anyone took off the gel coat and replaced it with VC-Tar. More likely they removed the bottom paint repaired the blisters then coated the boat with VC-Tar. Removing the Gel Coat is very expensive and a Catalina is not the kind of boat you spend that kind of money on.Bottm line GET A "GOOD" SURVEYROR!

 

[Russ Hauser]

I just went thru

this on my Cat 22 project boat. There must have been a thousand BB to pea sized blisters in a band about 8 to 10 inches wide from the water line down all around the boat. I had scheduled to have the gel coat pealed, but this didn't happen due to scheduling conflicts with the peeler guy and myself. I ended up grinding all the bottom paint off to expose the blisters and opened up each one with a Dremel tool and a ball nosed burr. Luckily, the boat had been out of the water for several months and all the blisters were dry. I filled them with Marinetex and faired the bottom. I applied 4 coats of Interlux 2000 barrier coat using very short nap rollers and ground it smooth with 60 grit paper in a random orbital sander hooked up to a Shop Vac. This was the same system I used to remove the bottom paint. I finished off with 4 coats of Interlux VC-17, applied with foam rollers, for a racing bottom. This took 36 days in total with many days off due to weather and other obligations.