Well, stickers are gone and hull cleaning up and not nearly as ugly. Hope to get old gunnels off today and new vinyl gunnels next week.
I'm going to 'glass in some skid plates on the Flashfire I'm refurbishing for the wife. I know that old, Bell "Heron Blue" will be impossible to match, but thought I could get some kind of pigment in there? Never colored the 'glass before. What do I use? Color in the resin too?
Can you fair the edges of the skid plates, so that an added layer or two of glass will lay close to the hull at the edges? Otherwise I would be inclined to remove the skid plates. Instead of sanding, you might try carefully down-cutting with a fine saw, maybe 60% or the thickness. This would be done to isolate small patches of skid plate so that you could use a chisel to attack the junction with the hull. Instead of pushing straight ahead, one might slice the chisel sideways to saw away the bond.
If things go well, the down-sawed segments may pop loose once the chisel work cuts and wedges them clean.
Maybe fill the gouges with thickened epoxy or JB Weld or some other putty, grind it all "smooth", and try a layer or two of bias-cut S-glass over the whole mess if you can get it to lay flat?
I like that canoe, BTW. Definitely worth an overhaul.
yup I fixed the stems on a few boats, and that’s the way I’d do it.
As for tinting the epoxy, I wouldn’t bother. I’ve tried that approach and either I did a very poor job of it (very likely) or it takes a whole lot of tint to make it look right (most definitely in my case).
I would suggest going by WalMart or some other store with an extensive spray paint selection, finding something that is close match, and spray painting over the skid plates, obviously after masking around them. Mad River, back in the pre-Confluence days, recommended that approach. Sort of. They recommended that you buy their $18 can of color-matched spray paint, but it didn’t work any better than what I bought locally.
Congratulations on the boat. That’s a great hull. We used to have one and it put a smile on my face every time I paddled it.
Well … Well I don’t know how those blueberries would taste with 303 on them, but I bet they will photograph well – nice and shiny just like those taken by professional food photographers.