Hi folks,
Getting some pics back from the guys currently redoing the bottom on my boat and whatever's going on looks super mysterious to me. For context, when I bought it, I knew it had a veritable rash of tiny blisters down the port side. Tiny ones, like goosebumps - not the kind I'd seen so often in all the "grind and fill" tutorials I obsessed over.
Pic here:
Well, survey came back as "they're cosmetic, it's an old boat" and a blister never sank a boat so it didn't stop me from moving ahead with the purchase - and still no regrets. That said, the last round of bottom paint it had put on was not done very well, bubbling and flaking off all over the place:
So, I decided as part of my mental budget for "initial maintenance", I'd get the bottom stripped, see if there was anything to do about the blisters, and put a better coat of epoxy/paint put on it. So it's up at the shop, and they have ground the paint down to the gelcoat in a number of spots, and bad news - the blisters are beneath the gelcoat. But, the blisters aren't exactly in the fiberglass laminate, either -- it looks like under the white gelcoat is...green paint? Under which is....grey paint (or epoxy)? and the blisters are almost entirely located within this mysterious layer of...something.
Pics here:
So my question to the group is, what's going on underneath the gelcoat? Is the green/grey factory finish or bottom paint from days gone by?
As far as the blisters go, the yard was going to grind out some initial spots to see how bad it would be to take it down to laminate but we've all decided that's pretty cost-prohibitive, given the age of the boat. I feel a little better knowing for sure that the blisters are more or less outside of the glass itself.
Getting some pics back from the guys currently redoing the bottom on my boat and whatever's going on looks super mysterious to me. For context, when I bought it, I knew it had a veritable rash of tiny blisters down the port side. Tiny ones, like goosebumps - not the kind I'd seen so often in all the "grind and fill" tutorials I obsessed over.
Pic here:
Well, survey came back as "they're cosmetic, it's an old boat" and a blister never sank a boat so it didn't stop me from moving ahead with the purchase - and still no regrets. That said, the last round of bottom paint it had put on was not done very well, bubbling and flaking off all over the place:
So, I decided as part of my mental budget for "initial maintenance", I'd get the bottom stripped, see if there was anything to do about the blisters, and put a better coat of epoxy/paint put on it. So it's up at the shop, and they have ground the paint down to the gelcoat in a number of spots, and bad news - the blisters are beneath the gelcoat. But, the blisters aren't exactly in the fiberglass laminate, either -- it looks like under the white gelcoat is...green paint? Under which is....grey paint (or epoxy)? and the blisters are almost entirely located within this mysterious layer of...something.
Pics here:
So my question to the group is, what's going on underneath the gelcoat? Is the green/grey factory finish or bottom paint from days gone by?
As far as the blisters go, the yard was going to grind out some initial spots to see how bad it would be to take it down to laminate but we've all decided that's pretty cost-prohibitive, given the age of the boat. I feel a little better knowing for sure that the blisters are more or less outside of the glass itself.
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