Daniel,
A few points,
You're heading in the right direction. I don't think Vertglas is a panacea, but you're light years ahead of the guys who believe in painting to restore faded hulls. Vertglas claims that it makes your gelcoat completely impervious to UV degredation. That's not accurate. It doesn't. But it should, if correctly applied, do an acceptable job of protecting your hulls for the bulk of the sailing season. Ant that's really all that matters.
This product sounds good but I would be interested to see how it holds up to repeated washings, sliding over the decks on and off the wire etc. Has anyone used it on their cat yet?
Wyatt, I'm with you. Once you do something that doesn't work very well, why keep on doing it? Hobienick, Catman, and all you guys who believe paint is the answer, I don't want to dissuade you from painting if your heart is set in that direction.
I believe I suggested he try sanding and polishing first.
But all you're doing is covering up old oxidized damage and doing nothing to prevent it from happening to your new paint job. Some paints are better than others, that's true, and will resist breakdown by the sun better than others. But they all deteriorate after a relatively short period of time.
I don't understand this at all. We use sand paper to prep the hull before painting. It removes the oxidized stuff and gives us some tooth for the paint or Gelcoat to adhere to. Yes some paints are better. I painted my old boat in 1989 with Imron. Four years later I polished it and it hardly made the boat look any better. It has the same paint job on today and the guy that owns it hasn't done anything to it at all. I walked over to recently with a little wax a rubbed a spot and it shined right up.
What do you consider a short time?
Wyatt, What did you paint your boat with? Imron does not chip off as long as the most basic prep work is done.
Most large yachts I've seen are painted not gelcoated. Some of the Tornado's of the top teams have paint jobs on them. My Hobie had areas where the gelcoat was 3/16 thick. Paint can be a few mils thick. Lighter.
Looking at the cost factor 1989-2005 at $70 per year. You can buy a nice paint job for that. By the way it cost me a couple hundred bucks to get the paint done. The 303 may work but where does all that stuff wear off to? The water? I have a 20' boat it's going to take more than a bottle and more than ten minutes.
If your hulls are damaged by deep scratches or cracks then you've got a repair job to do on the gelcoat. Other than these specific areas I would never sand the gelcoat. It's there for a purpose.
Now understand, my current boat is all Gelcoat and I don't have any plans to paint it. However finding Gel that matches is not easy. I had to have some custom mixed so I can do repairs that come close. With paint it's easy to do spot repairs that match perfectly.
Overall looks to me like most guys don't do anything to take care of their boats.
In a way this thread is a bit of an irony for me because I'm more interested in taking care of the hulls from the water line down. I wouldn't ever set my hulls on anything but my little foam rests.
Another way of looking at this is some of us use our boats. Your quite a ways up there. Your sailing season is how long?
I sail from March into December. My boat goes in on Friday and comes out on Sunday and thats almost every weekend.I actually use my boat to have fun and sometimes race. It's not uncommon for me to sail 150 miles in a weekend. That means going places and pulling up on beaches. It's unavoidable and silly not to enjoy this area when all it costs is a few hours twice a year touching up the bottom.
Bottom line is you make these decisions after carefully looking at your indivdual needs and weighing all the options and no matter what you decide to do, do it right.
Enjoy.
