Best paint for topside repairs.

aldeburgh

Well-Known Member
Joined
1 Apr 2003
Messages
71
Location
Jolly harbour
Visit site
I need to paint 2 areas about 1 sqm in total which have been repaired .I am after the best paint to blend in to the existing gel coat either by brush or sprayed.
Thanks
 
I've always used International Perfection two pot poly for topsides.
However you could try the newer Brightside one pot poly (with teflon!), which will be simpler for small areas. There's also Toplac enamel, good with UV, but I only use that on deck
 
Any of the paints will do the job but it's matching the colour which is most important for what you need.

Personally, I like International and Blakes two pack paints.
 
One of the local repair artists uses cellulose spray paint. Ordinary car-type stuff that you can get in any car spares shop, although I find that independents are better than chains. I was sceptical until he pointed out where it had been used on my boat on a repair that had been done before I bought it. I had never noticed in five years.

I had a few patches where the gel-coat was wearing thin and showing darker, also a couple where the "white" colour match was not too good. On a nice warm calm day, I put on about eight coats on the affected patches, athe the next day buffed them over with one of the farecla pastes. The result was great and lasted for about four years. It should have been redone this year, but never managed to get the warm calm day needed until the boat was back in the water. In fact I think Saturday was the first!
 
No, you can still use gelcoat, especially on curved surfaces which are much easier to do - the gelcoat is only very thin anyway so it doesn't build up noticably. On a flat surface a larger bluff in area would be required to ease any changes in depth or colour but even this can work really well if you sand back first to give half a mill of depth to the gelcoat.
 
Top