Gel coating the deck.

I gel coated the deck in record time before it got dark and worse cold. I started by double checking for bad areas of glass that might cause a problem, like rouge fiber hairs, bumps, divets, sharp edges, dribbles and drabbles. Found a good amount of things to clean up and took care of them. Blew the deck off with compressed air. Setup my gel coating tools and started rolling on the gel coat.



I had my resin mixer Mark mix one pint at a time and feed it to me slowly so I could go at a easy pace and not to worry about my gel coat gelling to fast. I ended up using gel coat WITH wax 1 coat only. The wax makes the surface of the gelcoat harden without it will never cure on the surface and remain sticky, the waxed gel coat would always be your last coat.



Now I had to match the webbing or veil pattern that are on the inner gunwales, So I stopped halfway,mixed regular polyester resin with black pigment and threw the webbing pattern black gel coat at the deck. Not the work of Picaso but for me its fine, a boat to me to me is a utility fishing tool not a fashion show. Anyway the best technique to throw the webbing at the hull was either very little paint on the brush with a hard swing and abrupt stop or just use a heavy stick and just bang the brush into the stick and let the stuff fly. Incase your wondering the boat manufactures use an additive to make the gel coat stringy and shoot it out of a special air paint gun.



I then continued rolling the gelcoat on the rest of the deck and made one last batch of black gel coat and webbed the rest of the deck. The new gelcoat is a lot brighter than the old gelcoat, in time it will fade and turn a bit off-white and match the original better.



I again tented the entire boat and placed the heater inside the tent.