Fiberglass: Round 1

I finished the 3 bottom patches and glassed the rail dings over the weekend. There was a lot of experimenting and some mistakes were for sure made but overall I've taken a step into the world of fiberglass and began to find my bearings. 

The bottom glass patches went down fine though not as smoothly as I had hoped. I increased the temps in the booth to around 77-80 degrees and applied the same mix of resin and hardener as before thinking that it was simply a temperature issue that was causing it to take so long to cure. Sadly it wasn't the case so I had a similarly long wait for the resin to cure in the first glass application. Once it had cured, everything looked good. I sanded down the glass patches to be flush with the bottom being careful not to sand away the glass itself and ruining the repair. 

By the time everything was flat and smooth things looked pretty good so I applied the hot coat, this time changing the resin/hardener mix to 10:1 (which is a lot more than recommended but it's the mix that works on this resin it seems). Once the resin cured i just had to sand down the tape lines and get everything smooth and finished. I decided to hit one area with the power sander and sanded the other by hand to see what the difference would be in time and quality. 

The power sander was quicker for sure but its a lot less forgiving and the areas surrounding my repair got a bit stripped down as I was trying to get rid of the tape lines. I assume that the original glass has yellowed a bit over time so as the first few microns got sanded away the yellow-ish original glass became whiter but the areas with new resin stayed yellowish and I'm left with a white border around the ding. 

The hand sanded area was a lot more neat though the same white border did show up again. I think moving forward i need to be a bit more delicate with sanding original glass plus I'm not sure the tape is necessary when hot coating. If I brush without tape then there'll be less new resin to sand down so maybe that'll help. 

The finished bottom dings look pretty janky but they're strong, smooth and waterproof. 

Taking the lessons I learnt from the first three dings I hit the rails. Glass application went fine and was much quicker with the new resin mix. The glass on the rails went from bottom to the deck so I cut the glass wide so any clusterfucks at the edges could just be sanded down.

Once the fresh glass was cleaned up by sanding I hot coated half of the rail whilst taping off the bottom half and instead of taping a safe area around the edges I just brushed on the hot coat with a brush. It cured overnight and looks great - I need to hot coat the second half of the rail and then clean things up.

I bought polish and a buffing pad as even though I sanded to 1500 grit, I want to better match the rest of the gloss finished board. Once that comes in I'll give all the dings a once over to bring out the shine.