patient chips/small scratches

[pjw]

i ahave a few minor scratches and a couple minor "dings". all is in the Brittney blue -- how should i fix these -- moomba refered me to gel coat company but these are minor not requiring gel coat -- just the paint? color matching paint?

[Fman]

I have good luck with Meguiars "Scratch X" to remove light scratches. I had a few kids hit the boat with the wakeboards and it was able to remove all of them. Takes a little elbow grease, but wont cause any more scratches and works well by hand.

[Razzman]

pjw, the color is the gel coat. Dings require gel coat repair. Scratches can be lighty rubbed out.

[snowboardcorey]

Your boat is not painted the exterior of your boat is gel coat. Chips, dings and semi deep scratches are going to require gel coat. You can usually get a patch paste kit, this is gel premixed with hardener, its kind of like colored body filler. Once the gel is dried you'll need to sand the area back to shape and then follow the directions for buffing out scratches.

Scratches can usually be wet sanded and buffed out. You can start with 1200 grit and move to 2000 grit to sand out the scratch, make sure the boat is clean and the sandpaper is wet, use the 2000 to sand out the 1200 scratches because any 1200 scrathes are to deep to buff out and will be visible. I use a product called Turbo Cut to buff out the scratches with a rotary (repeat rotary!) buffer, usually you'll need to hit the area twice to really get the shine back, darker colors may need to be buffed again with a swirl free polish.

Note that gel coat is pretty thick but not 100% consistent in thickness, body lines and tape lines may vary so you need to be careful not to sand through the gel. Doing so will lead to pretty costly repairs.

[jmvotto]

try this site this is what my dealer uses for gel coalt patch kits and paint.
i bought some for some dings and have not gotten to that project yet. I will try and post picks next week when i bring her home to fix the dings from the idiot at the gas station back in may

http://www.spectrumcolor.com/catalog.htm

[sandm]

I've got some gel repairs to do this winter, mainly a couple of small chips and spider cracks around one of the popup cleets.
been looking for a scrap boat to buy a chunk of the boat to practice gelcoat repairs on, but haven't been successful yet..