Restore the deck
This page will describe how I cut and fastened the 1/4" plywood to the framed skeleton. It will also describe the process of fibre glassing the deck.
Currently it does not say much because I have not yet started this phase of the project.
I have started cutting the plywood. Nothing is glued down yet because I need to do more sanding and structural fibre glassing, but with the plywood on, this is starting to look like a boat again!
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The deck is complete and it is quite a long story. The plywood was epoxy resined to the edge of the boat but in the center I used contact cement because it would be very difficult to clamp it. Using contact cement I just put heavy bricks all over the deck (about 800lbs) until I was sure the cement had cured.
For fibreglassing the deck I used a heavy matting and a polyester based resin. I used the polyester resin because it is cheaper than the epoxy based resin and it will allow a gelcoat to be applied.
It took two of us to do this job and my friend Jason from work came out to help. One applied the resin, the other rolled out bubbles and made sure the mat bent around corners.
The finished product was pretty impressive... too bad we could not just leave it like that.
After the fibreglass had dried, I sanded off the high spots and applied a coat of gelcoat. This is where I made my first major mistake! I thought the gelcoat would go on thick so I got the fibreglass relatively smooth but not perfectly smooth. The problem is that when you sand the gelcoat, you periodically hit a high spot of fibreglass which shows up as a clear mark.
I tried to get around that by applying a second coat of gelcoat however I still had the same problem. Time for plan B since gelcoat is not cheap and I had no gaurantees that a third coat would solve the problem. Also, I could see it taking MANY hours (or days) to get a decent finish with gelcoat.
Plan B was to sand the boat until it was smooth, regardless of whether I hit fibreglass or not. The gelcoat basically just acted as an expensive filler. Sanding took about 10 hours with a power sander as I kept going finer and finer with the grits.
Once I was happy with how it looked, I applied two coats of epoxy marine paint. The result was a shiny silver/gray finish that came pretty close to matching our car.
We were also much happier with this color than the baby blue gelcoat we bought. (Baby blue was the original color of the boat and it really looked dated)
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