Coloured Gelcoat

Originally posted by rb_stretch ...some blue gelcoat that looked close, hardener, wax and acetone from his industrial quantities decanted into old jam jars all for £12

Sounds like a good result to me... You'd have spent three times that or more on pigments alone attempting a colour match yourself.

One thing I learnt - make sure you are matching the gelcoat to a bit of boat that is in the condition you want it in....in the past I have worked on old boats' gelcoat (yep same mistake more than once) then treated with Fareclas only to find I should have matched a whole light lighter.  Doh!  So if you are planning to tidy the area up do it first, then do the repair area again when the job's done.

Originally posted by Jack Sparrow

and don't do it when it's cold. It don't work.

Gel coat pigments are widely available, notably in small quantities at most Chandlers from Blue Gee at truly horrendous prices.

The challenge is colour matching the gel coat on the boat with the pigments you can find. If you are lucky then the manufacturer of the boat will still be trading and may have supplies of correctly coloured gel coat. If so then no matter how atrocious their gel coat price over what your chandler is selling it is still worth buying it!

If you don't have that luxury, well... Colour matching is a skill I had twenty five years ago and no longer possess: you need to keep in practice. Its probably easiest to put the boat on a trailer, take it to a chandler with a generous colour range of pigments on a sunny day, and with the shop's cooperation the pots outside until you find the one that's the nearest match and accept that the scratches will show a bit. Don't attempt to take a bit of boat into the shop and match under artificial light. Blue Gee have a lot of colours, so if you find a shop with a really good range you may well get pretty close.

If you are really keen to get an exact match you will have to buy a selection of pots of different colours and practice, practice, practice on odd scraps until you have a mix that's close enough to satisfy you. You will need to be doing this long enough to acquire the skill of colour matching.

Of course if you have a friend who posesses this skill then you can attempt to round them up and get them to help... It may take a lot of beer... And before you ask, I learned recently with my Moth that I have lost the skill...

Edited by JimC - 14 Jan 13 at 5:41pm