Refinishing: Who has tried a shortcut?

Hello All

There has been quite a bit on refinishing on RAS recently. Most people
advocate that when gel-coat starts cracking up, it is essential to remove
it ALL.

Does anybody out their own a ship which was refinished without removing all
the gel-coat? What is the service history of these gliders?

If the RAS collective are right on this, I suspect that there will be a
number of hard luck stories out there from people who have discovered this
the hard way.

Personally, I know of many ships that have been resprayed. I suspect many of
them were not sanded down to glass and those that I see around don't look
too shabby. I can't help feeling that there is another side to this story.

I used to own a share in Nimbus II that was resprayed with poly urethane
paint (Glasflurit "Durothane K" they claimed) by the previous owner. I
don't know what condition the gel was prior to painting, or how much gel
was removed. There was no obvious sign of a primer layer under the paint
either.

However, I had it for 10 years and the poly finish was perfect when I sold.
The only problem we had with it was doing minor repairs. It was very
difficult to re-spray a small area without a visible brownish "water mark"
where the new and old paint met. But we just lived with a few water marks.

We used to polish the finish with a "liquid polymer" car polish. (Why not,
car polish on car paint, works on hundreds of thousands of cars ..) Can't
say we had a problems from that, except that I suspect it may be have had
something to do with the water marks.

For small dings we filled with body filler and/or high build poly urethane
primer, then resprayed with aerosol lacker. After sanding and polishing,
the results were pretty neat. For bigger repairs we masked off and
resprayed an entire "panel" with the original poly urethane, primer and top
coat.

After my experiences I would never pay anybody to refinish a glider with gel
coat. If I ever bought a new glider, and I had a choice, I would order a
urethane finish.

Now I have bought a share in an LS3a that has the original gel coat finish
over most of the surface. We keep it polished with a "silicon free" glazing
wax. But it is pretty cracked up and I am wondering how it is going to
become a urethane finish.

Who has been down this road before and tried a "short cut"?


Regards

Ian