Good fiberglass refinishing resources

[nw60312]

Long time lurker, new to us boat owner as of a week ago, a 1982 Muntineer.

The plan is to pull it into the garage over the winter for a few projects. Will be a adding few wood bits back to the boat but mostly trying to spruce up the fiberglass. Pulling the teenage kiddo into the mix who is getting hooked on sailing as part of the process as we go.

Any suggestions for good forums for getting help and advice for this type of work?

Thanks!
-Nate

[Hugh MacD]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

Welcome aboard, Nate! Good on ya for getting kids involved! Always fun to get youngsters hooked into this sport. A good many of the members here have boats out of "that other" stuff. I don't know of anything specific to the Mutineer (I assume you've checked online", but while it's focused on bigger boats, there is a huge wealth of information on the J-30 forum ( http://j30.us/ubbthreads/ubbthreads....equipment.html ) on pretty much every aspect of fiberglass work. I suspect the J-24 site has similar coverage and is closer in size although they're still a balsa core construction which I don't think your Mutineer is.

[Todd Bradshaw]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

Yeah, there are enough of us here with glass boat refurbishing/restoring/repair experience that I'd be rather surprised if you could stump us. There are also a lot of YouTube videos showing fiberglass restoration. You can pretty much bet that an old one will have some gelcoat chalking which will need to be polished out, maybe some hairline cracks (crazing) in the gelcoat (which may or may not be bad enough to worry about), along with some chips and scratches which could use filling. Getting it cleaned up and buffed back to a reasonable shine isn't an awful job, but can take some work. It is certainly also possible to find serious structural problems requiring repairs, but every case is different and most can be fixed.

Trying to make it look like new is usually a whole lot of tedious work, which you may or may not want to do beyond the level of making it a pretty good looking boat for its age which works well. My latest this summer was restoration of a 1975 Boston Whaler Sport 13. It is certainly not showroom perfect, but it's pretty darned respectable and a blast to use.

[signalcharlie]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

Contact West System and ask for a copy of their EPOXYWORKS magazine.

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Jamestown Distributors has a great Tech Help line and you can order the tools and materials while on the phone.

We have blogged about fixing a lot of little fiberglass boats, working on a Sunfish right now. Use the Search window or tag cloud to find what you need. Our blog is Small Boat Restorations

Or you can find us on facebook Small Boat Restoration most days.

Holler if you can't find what you need!

[navydog]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

+1 one Jamestown Distributors. I just wish they sold elbow grease.

[Breakaway]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

When restoring fiberglass finish you can swing a polisher/ sander or you can swing a paintbrush. Having done both, I recommend considering the latter as often taking less time and effort.

Kevin

[JimConlin]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

For an older glass boat, there are three major options on spiffing up the glass parts.
- Sanding...polishing the original gelcoat.
- Refinishing with conventional (alkyd) paint.
- Refinishing with two-part polyurethane paint system such as Awlgrip, Alexseal or Interlux Perfection.

If the gelcoat is not seriously scraped and of uniform color, it can be restored. It’s a lot of work, but gelcoat is tougher and easier to keep than paints.
Conventional (alkyd) paint is easy to work with, but doesn’t weather very well and isn’t very tough.
The two-part paint systems are a lot more work and much more costly but look great, are tougher and weather well.

INterlux publishes a useful pamphlet describing their paint systems. The Awlgrip manual is very complete.

[navydog]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

For an older glass boat, there are three major options on spiffing up the glass parts.
- Sanding...polishing the original gelcoat.
- Refinishing with conventional (alkyd) paint.
- Refinishing with two-part polyurethane paint system such as Awlgrip, Alexseal or Interlux Perfection.

If the gelcoat is not seriously scraped and of uniform color, it can be restored. It’s a lot of work, but gelcoat is tougher and easier to keep than paints.
Conventional (alkyd) paint is easy to work with, but doesn’t weather very well and isn’t very tough.
The two-part paint systems are a lot more work and much more costly but look great, are tougher and weather well.

INterlux publishes a useful pamphlet describing their paint systems. The Awlgrip manual is very complete.

To be 100% acurate:
three major options on spiffing up the glass parts.
- (Sanding only if compounds don't get the job done. Sand with very fine papers above 1000 grit, if you go through the gellcoat go to option 3)..Compounding. Then polishing the original gelcoat.
- Lots of sanding. Refinishing with conventional (alkyd) paint.
- Even more sanding, close to a mirror finish) Refinishing with two-part polyurethane paint system.

If the decks need refinishing its a whole different ballgame.

[johngsandusky]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

If it's just chalky, I like Penetrol. I mostly use it as a primer on glass ply decks.

[Todd Bradshaw]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

On the Whaler I took off anything that was attached, with the exception of a couple of terminal blocks that lead to the wiring inside the hull. The wood was all stripped and refinished and a new front hatch was made to replace a missing one - basic woodworking 101 stuff. Then I flipped the hull and did some gel coat patching on the bottom. I'm not great at gel coat work, but they will do. Since the pre-packaged gel coat for Whalers is notorious for not matching the old boats, I used a clear gel coat paste, mixed with opaque white resin pigment and then added just a tad of yellow and brown acrylic artist's paints by eye to get the off white shades for hull and deck (which are slightly different). I had a little bit of crazing in a couple spots inside, but they weren't structural or ugly enough to mess with. The process for that is to grind the tiny cracks into V-shaped ditches using a Dremel, fill them with gel coat, sand them smooth and polish them out. All too often, the color doesn't match perfectly and the final result shows more and looks worse than the original crazing did.

Both the inside and outside were either power or wet-sanded to 320-400 grit to get rid of chalking, followed by 600 grit on a random orbit (or by hand where it wouldn't fit) then power-buffed with 3M Super Duty Rubbing Compound, then 3M Perfect It polishing compound and finally topped with West Marine Cleaner/Wax (wax with a little polishing compound added). The end result looks damned respectable for a 45 year old boat.

The last one I did was a little Nordica, double-ended sailboat. An old couple had owned it and let it fill up with water in storage until the rear trailer pads broke through the hull. I got it for $800 and I had to drain it, dry it, patch the holes and then grind and barrier coat the bottom to fix some patches of gel coat blisters (six coats of epoxy and aluminum flake powder, then sanded smooth from the waterline down). It also got a lot of buffing on the upper, white part. The hull was a strange gold color which I didn't like, so I painted it with Brightside on the topsides and Hydrocoat bottom paint down below. A very cool little boat.

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[Alan H]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

I echo everything said here... I would start with *extremely* fine grit sandpaper on a random-orbital sander on the hull. GO LIGHT....and keep moving. Then move on to a soft disk with mildly abrasive buffing/rubbing compound. Clean VERY THOROUGHLY with soap and water and rinse well, and then wax or use any of a number of easily available "shine-'em-up" products on the market. This is assuming you don't have any major gouges to fill and fair.

On the other hand, you have a 15 foot Chrysler Mutineer..... its a great little racing daysailer, but it's not exactly a "classic yacht". IMHO...and this is just me..."cosmetics" on a boat like this is worth something like two weekend afternoons worth of work. More than that...why? You could be sailing.

Mutineers are great fun....good choice.

[nw60312]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

Thanks for all the responses. Got a few pictures to aid the description. One of the previous owner kept it on the water so it got a coat of bottom paint, which subsequently has been partly removed. Living in CO we won't be sacrificing any sailing for cosmetic projects for the winter (note the snow in the background from this morning). Previous owner started to work on the foils a bit. So we are thinking of bring it into the garage for the winter for the following:

1) Sprucing up the gelcoat as much as possible. Remove the bottom paint and cut / polish the gelcoat to spruce it up as much as possible.
2) Clean up / fair the foils.
3) Couple of projects related to center board cover to resolve before spring.

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Suggestions as to start with foils as a starter project or pull it in the garage, flip it over and start working on the hull? What would be the recommended process for removing the bottom paint and having a go at cleaning up the gelcoat?

Thanks!

[nw60312]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

Hello,

We are getting started on the cleaning up the centerboard and rudder. Both have some nicks to fill and little bit of faring. Once we get the all that done what would be a good finish coat?

Thanks!
-Nate

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[Hugh MacD]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

Are those glass? If the boat is dry sailed I'd go with a 2-pack polyurethane. Otherwise I'd investigate what the preferred bottom paint for your area is. Not sure what the rules are for Colorado and every zone seems to have it's own favorite bottom paint. I'm in freshwater here, too and prefer VC-17 (Interlux) but it doesn't like to be out of the water r it looses its antifouling properties so it's not intended for trailer boats.

[nw60312]

Re: Good fiberglass refinishing resources

They are glass, CB is looks gelcoat, rudder maybe had gelcoat that someone has sanding much of it off? It will be dry sailed, so something along the lines of interlux perfection?