A previous owner of my ASW17 refinished the glider
in two pack acrylic. I was necessary to remove all
the gel coat before this was done and reprofile where
necessary. The gelcoat provided some of the profiling.
It is much easier to maintain than gelcoat and is not
as susceptible to cracking, so far.
I owned a Kestrel previously and we thought about stripping
off the gel and putting acrylic on that. Two reasons
for not doing it, firstly the gelcoat on the Kestrel
was bomb proof and the wings would have needed an awful
lot of profiling work we thought.
Also sanding off gelcoat is not the most health concious
thing you can do.

I have seen gliders which have been re-gelled in Poland
and the cost is about the same as stripping down and
painting with acrylic, it is just a question of durability.


At 14:00 16 December 2003, Richard Pfiffner wrote:
Refinish of Ventus b wings.

The only short cut I found was to uses very heavy grit
paper to remove the
gel coat. I used 60 grit with a 7' rotary variable
speed sander. As I got
close to the fabric I changed to 80 grit. Be carefully
you don't sand into
the fabric. I can also recommend that when you profile
your wings make sure
you roll or spray on enough surfacer, so you don't
have to do it twice. I
also recommend using at least a 3' or 4' long aluminum
extrusion to profile
the wings. Use adhesive paper or spray on adhesive.
Make sure it is flat.
I intially used 80 grit to profile. The second time
I used 200. Then
sprayed DCC acrylic urethane. So far I have 172 hours
into the project. But
it finally looks shiney. Estimate about 25 hours left
to wet sand polish
and assemble the flaps & ailerons.

Richard
www.craggyaero.com



'Ian Forbes' wrote in message
...
Janusz Kesik wrote:

I used to own a share in Nimbus II that was resprayed
with poly

Maybe it has been painted with polyurethane paint
since new?

No, it was painted by the previous owner. Much of
the manual work was done
by his son and his son's friend. I spoke to the friend
about this, that is
how I know it was 'Durathane K'.

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.

The paint You use, is fresh, new, etc. and the paint
layer which has
been
laid few years ago is just 'old' due to sun, dust,
and anything else
with
what has it been in contact since painting. They're
just different
because of age, and even if You have the same paint
(the same catalogue
No.) effect most likely will be different in any
case.

The effect was cosmetic, and not readily visible,
but annoying because no
amount of effort seemed to get rid of it.

I found that sanding the adjacent area with 1200 wet
and dry prior to
spraying seemed to help prevent the mark, but it was
always there to a
greater or lesser extent.

(Just like cracks in gel coat - they are always present,
just the extent
varies!)

Car panel beaters always spray an entire mudguard,
door, bonnet etc to
avoid
this problem.


Ian