Spectrum Color Available Services List. Boat Gel Coat Repair iboats. Learn how to repair damaged gelcoat, presented by Boating Magazine. Video Transcript Okay. Well, here is the hole that were going to repair today. This is a hole on the gelcoat, it was for an old screw hole that was holding something down. So as you can see, theres a little bit of staining from rust and whatnot around it. So, were going to try to fix it and Im going to take you step by step through the process and we will hope for the best outcome. Okay. Now, here is the hole as it stands right now. Were going to grind it down a little bit. Spectrum Color Gel Coat Patch Paste' title='Spectrum Color Gel Coat Patch Paste' />Were going to use a drill bit, a drill with a countersink bit just to grind it down just a little bit. I cant get in to it that way so Im going to back off a little bit and here we go. All right. So, were just going to grind it down just a little, dont want to get too carried away with this. So, there you go. Ground the edges down a little bit. Patch Paste Kit. All Gel Coat and Patch Paste Products have a shelf life of 6 months. NonStocking Discontinued Pp Kits. Spectrum Color Gel Coat Patch Paste' title='Spectrum Color Gel Coat Patch Paste' />Try to get it flush with the surrounding surface and camphor the edges just a little bit. So, might get a little bit more grinding on this and then were going to clean it up and mask in off. Now were going to clean up this with a little bit of acetone. We got a can of acetone and we got a rag and Ive got some gloves on to protect my hands from the chemical. Basically, what were going to do here is were going to soak a little bit of acetone onto the rag and were going to clean up the surface as best we can trying to get rid of any residual silicone or any kind of adhesive that might be inside the screw hole, that would prevent the gelcoat from adhering properly to this particular repair. So, we clean it up as well as we can right now and Im going to clean up a little bit more, and then were going to come back here and tape off the hole and get it ready for applying the gelcoat. All right, here we are again. This time weve taped off the area immediately surrounding the repair area and that is we make a little bit carried away with the masking tape. But the idea here is to protect any of the surrounding material, such as the stainless steel, the underlying gelcoat, or the starboard structure to the left there from any damage or any gelcoat for that matter that might occur while were doing the repair. All right, now were going to mix up the gelcoat and get it ready to apply to the repair area. Here we have the main ingredients of our gelcoat repair. We have a mixing cup right here, we have the resin. In this case Im using a paste or a gel resin. We have some whitening agent and this is the whitening agent here. Its just kind of a white creamy paste that you add to the gelcoat. And finally, we have the hardener or the catalyst that you add to the gelcoat once youve mixed up the color with the gelcoat the way you want it. All right, lets get started. All right well, the first step is to take out a bit of the gelcoat. Im using just a little popsicle stick here and Im going to add it to the mixing cup. Responses to Oak Floor Maintenance Top Tips for Finishing Oak Rajeev Seesurrun Says February 23rd, 2015 at 530 pm. Hello there. Youve got problems, Ive got advice. This advice isnt sugarcoatedin fact, its sugarfree, and may even be a little bitter. Welcome to Tough Love. I/41sLGC-wdyL.jpg' alt='Spectrum Color Gel Coat Patch Paste' title='Spectrum Color Gel Coat Patch Paste' />Now Im probably going to mix up more that Im going to need for this particular application, but better to have more than you need than not have enough. Now, the next step is to add the whitening agent. You dont really need to add a lot of the whitening agent, about 2. And on this particular case, the whitening agent is a little runny so we didnt mix it up. So, there we go. We got a little bit of whitening agent in there, now were going to mix that up. Now that weve mixed up our color weve added a white pigment, and Ill say I had a just a hint of some black because the gelcoat in this repair is a little bit on the grey white side, but not much. So, next step is to actually add the hardener which we have right here or the catalyst. Were going to add about eight drops per teaspoon of gelcoat. 2020 Design Catalog. So, we got about a teaspoon here, maybe a little bit more, so were going to go a little bit heavy on the hardener. Probably add about 1. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten drops. Thats 1. 0 drops right there. And now the hardener. Spectrum Color Gel Coat Patch Paste' title='Spectrum Color Gel Coat Patch Paste' />This is going to work with the gelcoat and it will create a chemical reaction thatll start to make it gel and then eventually get hard. But before that happens, were going to go out and were going to apply this to the repair area. All right. So here we are with the gelcoat on the boat and were going to make the repairs to the area. So, Ive mixed up the catalyst and the gelcoat thoroughly, got to do that make sure youve mixed it up thoroughly. And here we go with our repair. So, youre just going to kind of drip it in to this particular hole. The trick here is to make sure it gets deep inside and doesnt just sit on surface and create an air pocket. So, were kind of shoving it down there a little bit, making sure that it gets down inside the repair area. So, were going to put just a little bit more on here. We mixed up way more gelcoat than we needed but thats kind of part of the process. By the way, if you have any other repairs, we can do those now although gelcoats going to harden up here pretty quickly and we wont have a whole lot of working time we can see its starting to gel already, maybe about 1. So try not to get too much gelcoat anywhere other than the actual repair area, though you want to make sure that that gets in there really good. So there we go. But right now, Im going to let it sit. Im going to let it harden. Also, we dont want to get too much on there because then well have more sanding to do, so lets smooth that out a little bit. So there we go. Theres our gelcoat repair. At this stage, were going to let it harden and were going to come back and were going to start our sanding process. All right. Here we are now with our gelcoat setup. Some people like to spray polyvinyl alcohol on here to let it dry. I prefer to just let it dry on its own and maybe a little tacky on the outside, but were going to sand it down anyway. So what we got here is three grades of sandpaper. I got a fairly aggressive grade, this is a 3. We got a 6. 00 grit, and Ive got an 8. I got a little bit of water here because this is wetdry sandpaper, so Im going to be wetting the sandpaper as I start sanding. So, I will start with my fairly aggressive sandpaper first, and then were going to work our way down to the finer sandpaper as we finish up the job. Weve taken the repair down about as far as we can. As you can see, were starting to sand through some of the masking tape and thats not good, you dont want to be sanding areas that dont need to be sanded down. So, at this point, were going to remove the masking tape and well see that the repair is still a little high, but its down to the level of the masking tape at this point, so thats a sign that we need to be taking the tape off. Here we are with the tape peeled away. You can see the immediate repair area. Ive worked it down at this stage with 3. This point, now Im going to start going to work on it with the 6. Youll notice I left a little bit of tape on the sides of objects immediately surrounding this repair. Thats just so I dont inadvertently sand other areas that I dont want to sand. So, better get to work now with the 6. This process is going to take about five minutes. Previous to this its going to take another five to ten minutes to finish it up. Im working away on the repair with the 6. Youll see that Im keeping the sandpaper fairly wet and confining my sanding just to the immediate area of the repair.