Washing The Boat

Hot soapy water. You're going to remove the surafce of the gel coat anyway with the polish, so why waste elbow grease trying to get engrained dirt out of it?
 
E lix e-orr?

Sounds line something Winny the Pooh might do!

OK I'll get me coat! /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
ok, more serious answer: you can remove initial dirt with water alone. You can remove more dirt with water and some of hlb's so-alled "boat remover" and if you send him a pm tellim you want 5 litres, sendim a cfheque and he'll send you the stuff. Be careful with this, cosd it's caustic so make sure you rinse the boat loads after using. Now the boat is pretty clean, but not ready for polish. You remove rust stains uoui can use Y10, and you can smoth and flatten the grp itself using a rubbing compound, something like Farecla G7 and this is a lot of work depending on how shiny you want it. The shine shows how smooth the grp actually is. Like paint on a car, or a piece of fine furniture, you only apply polish once the thing is shining in the first place. The polish should protect it. But don't use the polish to short-circuit the preparation - it'll be ok, but not for long.

Next year, consider applying polish *before* the winter, or for a long period of not using the boat, or if transaporting it: poster stelican showed me ths - put the polish on, smear it about - and leave it like that. You now have a boat with a protective surface that you can rinse/buff off a few months later with nit much effort.

hope this helps
 
well, given we havent had too many calm , balmy days, I seem to return to the marina with the boat covered in salt. Given I m then going to wash it down anyway, I usually run round after with a bucket of wash+polish/wax, or whatever its called. Only takes afew extra minutes#-maybe it helps top up the wax, but at £10 a bottle that lasts a season, its not one of the major expenses.
Makes you feel good /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
 
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you only apply polish once the thing is shining in the first place. The polish should protect it.

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Don't quite follow that, polish is, by definition, abrasive, and that's what makes the boat shiny. If you want to make it shiny before you polish it, you'd have to ... erm ... polish it.
 
If you use fairy liquid too much the surface could go very sticky and its almost impossible to remove. also it can discolour aswel.
 
I use a citrus-based bath cleaner - I think it's Mr Muscle; after all, it's supposed to be used for cleaning plastic bathtubs /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif. Works OK and relatively low impact on the environment.

I'm sure I recall tcm saying that he'd experimented with petrol as a hull cleaner once upon a time, though I wonder if things went wrong when he stepped back to admire his handiwork lit a nice, relaxing cheroot, and ...............
 
no, polish (like marine wax polish etc) isn't suposed to be used as an abrasive. It's just smeared or squirted on and that surface buffed. On anything other than newish grp it'd be shortlasting shine, or just not that shiny. Not new shiny.

Rubbing compound such as G7 definitely *is* abrasive. You cab get a good shine with 1000 (a bit) and definitely with 2000 grade wet and dry, used wet on marks on gelcoat, then finish with rubbing compound and if you are going to apply polish, may as well get that suface super-shiny first. You rinse off, before applying polish.
 
Technically, I think rubbing compound is just coarse polish, what's called boat polish is finishing polish, and what you put on once it's shiny to keep it that way, is wax.

To save time, some polishes have wax in them (ie. wax polish), but that just means it's doing two jobs at the same time.

Happy to be proven wrong, but fairly sure that if you're not abrading something, then strictly speaking, you're not polishing it.
 
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