Gel Coat Restorer

gjbentley

gjbentley

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Can anyone recommend a user friendly Gel Coat Restorer for a 20 year old yacht that needs more than the usual Y10 and wax polish to keep her shining all season ?

The yellow stain marks on the hull above the water make their appearence earlier each year.
 
Unlikely as it may seem, before you spend money on specialist products, try a cleaner called 'Spotless'. It is biodegradable and only costs £2.49 a tub. Wilkinsons (and probably others) sell it and it worked very well on my boat.

Alan
 
Broadly speaking, if your gelcoat is shot, that's about it. Nothing short of a respray will overcome 20 years of exposure to the elements. However, you can win back a bit of the shine with a bit of elbow grease and a good cleaner and polish combination. Y10 will get the yellow off, but if you just do the waterline it wil show up how dingy the rest of the topsides have become. You can buy some of those expensive light abrasives like Farecla. Better value is careful use of domestic stuff like Astonish, the Wilkinsons stuff mentioned in an earlier post, or even basic cream cleaner. The key to success is to apply a good polish immediately after the cleaning treatment. If you don't, the abraded surface will pick up dirt like no tomorrow and all your effort will have been in vain.
I have tried a couple of those "back to new" gelcoat restorers and they were not very satisfactor, a pain to apply and in my view, poor value for money. The sad fact is that once the surface has started to go it is an inevitable process and you should be resigned to doing a light ( and I mean light) rub down say every other season, followed by the polish. For really degraded surfaces that have the grey patches showing, you can clean things up with fine wet and dry. But remembe that a gelcoat is pretty thin and overenthusiastic rubbing down could leave you with a worse problem.
 
Polishing with a suitable rubbing compound and a foam compounding mop will do the trick. It is not a magic solution as it requires a fair bit of work but the results can be spectacular.

take a look at the marine section of the Farecla website

3M also do similar products and a kit is, or at least was, available. To my mind it was expensive though.

I restored a dull pink hull to a shiny red using a Farecla (automotive ) product.
 
No easy route...

There isn't an easy route to achieving lasting shine on an older hull. Like samwise, I'd certainly caution against using "instant" products such as Poliglow; in my experience the end result is pretty dire (and difficult to remove).

For my 17-year-old white hull, I first wash it with lots of sudsy water and a little "creme cleaner", used with minimum pressure. Then Y10 (or similar oxalic acid product) to get rid of patches of yellowing. Then a mildly abrasive colour restorer on any scrapes or stubborn stains. Then 2 coats of Meguiars #45 Polish, followed by 2 coats of Meguiars #56 Pure Wax to seal the surface. I use Meguiars (a) because it's very good stuff and (b) because it's very easy both to apply by hand and to polish off by hand.
 
Without a picture I'm guessing, but the yellow cast on the hull above the waterline is probabaly algaic in origin. It gets a toehold on a surface that has microindentations in it. I have it at the end of the season too and my hull is 10 years old and gets loads of cleaning, polish etc every year without fail! But the polish only protects so long....

Removing the deposit with gentle hand action is advisable, (I use Brasso) then, as mentioned by others, loads of quality polish to present the smoothest surface possible to organisms that are looking for a nice suitable surface!

Sometimes the cast is oil based - depending on how dirty the waters are where you've been sailing. The test is does it come off easily with a little meths?

I strongly endorse caution in what's used on the gell coat. You will never be able to recover that fresh from the factory look, so over larding it can add to your grief and bring closer the day when you have to send your beloved to the paint shop!

PWG
 
wessex chemical factors do a 2-part grp restorer system for 100quid. Unique product to them. Makes the boat look new. Called er GRP restorer. Google, uk company, nice lot, actual chemists rather than the usual nitwits making a few quid reselling garbage from the usa at double the import cost...
 
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We had very good results with http://www.poliglow.co.uk/ - worth talking to the guy as he will explain how it works and give you useful tips .

Total c@#$p IMHO. Looks nice for a week and then accumulates all the dirt it can possibly attract. Almost like it is electrical charging the gel coat.
 
It's not rocket science to get a nice shiny new surface by using a grp polish or restorer. It works by removing material from the surface.

If you leave it at that, the surface is exposed to fresh attack and deposits, so to make it last, you have to protect it - most people use wax.

A wax coating can be buffed to a brilliant shine and as you buff it, it beds into the microscopic pores on the surface. If you use cheap grade waxes, it wears off pretty quickly, so if you don't want to waste your effort, you need to get the hardest possible wax - that's Carnauba. It's harder than concrete and comes in various grades. It's generally better to use a pure wax product as a separate step than to use a combined wax and polish. This is because the pure wax product can be formulated with a bigger concentration of carnauba than a combined wax and polish.

The alternative is a synthetic Glaze product that bonds to the prepared gel coat, and lasts longer than conventional waxes. Our Boat Glaze has a good proportion of PTFE, so it has non-stick properties that help to shed dirt and new attacks.

Having said all of this, there is no permanent solution. All surface treatments need to be maintained and topped up from time to time. But in my opinion, it's has to be better to top up a wax or glaze surface than to abrade a bit more of the gel coat away with polish or cutting compounds
 
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