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May 2018
75
boatingonthehudson.com
2- Vertical
damage ground
out showing
body filler and
cracks through
strake.
Strake ground out.
All body filler removed
- there’s still more
grinding to do.
Ground out and ready for layup.
C
osmetic and structural boat repair is an art -
quality repairs take time and knowledge to perfect.
The proper materials and labor can be expensive
which tend to lead people to take a cheaper route
to have repairs made. Remember the old saying
“It’ll come back to bite you”?
Bad repairs can fail! They can cause catastrophic
failure jeopardizing the safety of passengers.
We recently did a repair on a boat that had major
impact damage located under the water line and it
was filled with body filler and a lot of the damage
was hidden under bottom paint. The relatively
new bottom paint was not applied properly. The
paint allowed water to seep into the polyester filler
material further breaking down the
material. I did an adhesion test
and I was able to take it off with
my thumb nail. The hull was shiny.
Nothing sticks to shine. The hull
should have been sanded with 80
grit sandpaper for a good paint
bond. The owner had purchased
the vessel not knowing the full
extent of the damage and the bad
repairs that were done on it. The
boat had serious fractures and
needed to be repaired properly! I
removed the paint on the entire hull
and discovered another bad repair on the opposite
side. That previous repair was also filled with just
body filler. I proceeded to repair it properly and the
hull was sanded with 80 grit sandpaper. The entire
hull now was able to be examined.
Body filler has no structural integrity at all. It
is used as a finishing material mainly used in
automotive repair. Save it for cars that don’t see
a lot of water. The correct repair which we did for
all this type of damage was to grind out the entire
fractured fiberglass and rebuilt it with epoxy resin,
fiberglass mat, fiberglass cloth and epoxy fillers
to re-establish the body lines. Epoxy barrier was
applied next. Over the epoxy barrier bottom paint
was applied. A side note about epoxy barrier-
Epoxy barrier, a primer for bottom
paint is cheaper in cost than
bottom paint will protect repairs
and help protect against water
intrusion. In my opinion no boat
should be bottom painted without
having epoxy barrier applied first.
The methods of bad repairs that
I have seen and had to “redo”
are astonishing. Sometimes
down-right scary done by the “the
hacker”- uneducated- the “for