Repair of chips in gelcoat...

[lance on cloud nine]

Hi Friends - as I am working along on my O'Day 26 rehab/tidy up, I am wondering what you would consider the best product to fill small gelcoat chips...keeping in mind that I might want to try and see how well I could then touch up the repair with new gelcoat. Most of the chipped area is small...like 1/4" across or less and not really much down into the glass itself.
is it true that if I were to fill with epoxy that the gelcoat might not adhere so well?

hope you all are doing well.  Thanks, Lance

[CapnK]

Hi Lance -

There are a few options for that. For what you have described, you could just use premade gelcoat to do the job. It is basically resin with pigment added.

You could also simply add pigment to epoxy resin, and get an even better repair than poly- or vinylester resin based gelcoat. This is due to the fact that epoxy has better "secondary bonding characteristics" than poly- or vinylester resins - which means it has better adherence to resin that has already been cured for some time, and will be less likely to fail. The "5 Minute" stuff at WalMart or a hardware store will work for that.

Depending on the color you are trying to match, you might also want to look at a product called Marine Tex. It is epoxy based, and kind of expensive for the amount of material you get, but is handy to have and stores well over long term.

Have fun!

[lance on cloud nine]

Thank you CapnK!