Deck Repair Advice- Quick!

sailorsteven

sailorsteven

New Member
I went to practice today and found a nasty hole that was put in my deck in the area behind the traveler. The fiberglass is depressed and cracked all the way through in about 50% of the dent, put the other half is still hanging on. I would rather not have to cut an inspection port and would like to avoid getting on the inside of the boat. Any advice for fixing this 3 inche wide, circular dent?
 
A pic would help, but there is nothing really structural back there.

You do realize it would be really easy to put the inspection port right in the area where the damage is and save yourself all the trouble of patching it, right ?

If you only want to patch it from the outside, first make sure the area is strong enough to just fill in the dent/crack (it shouldn't feel like you can push your hand thru the deck ). I would sand and fill the area with thickened resin.
 
Find someone who has cut a port in their deck, and use the cut out "hole" to make a cosmetic patch, after you have dug into the bad spot, and filled it enough to seal it. Use a similar year patch, and the colors will match.

Al
 
Take a picture of it for us...

If you do not want the inspection port then you will have to sand the area down, then get some west system epoxy and fiberglass cloth and repair the area.

You should PM Governail, he owns a fiberglass shop.
 
Again depending on how bad it is and how much trouble you want to go to...

If you don't want to leave a new inspection port in your deck and the repair is pretty bad, the procedure is roughly:

1. Cut/grind away all the damaged glass until you're left with nothing but solid materials around it.

2. Build up a backing for the repair. Depending on how big it is,

-- if it's small, you can stuff a piece of cardboard/stiff plastic thru it that has a string punched thru the middle, then use the string to hold it in place while you create/ apply the repair

-- if it's bigger, you can glue some wooden battens into place (again using the string technique) to create a backing (think paint stirrers)

3. Glass patch the hole. Cut cloth bigger than the hole, wet it out with resin, lay it over the hole, repeat with successively smaller patches, until you've got a nice repair even with the old deck. If the repair was big, you'll probably want a layer of foam core in there, otherwise you'll end up using a LOT of cloth in the repair, and it'll be heavy without adding strength to the boat.

4. Apply gelcoat to match existing surface. This is an art in itself. Remember

- color matching is hard
- texture matching is hard
- gelcoat does not dry in the presence of air (need mylar covering or something)
- polyester gelcoat can't be used over an epoxy fiberglass repair.
- epoxy gelcoat will be hard to get a good color match to the polyester gelcoat that's already on the laser

There are whole books on this.
 
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