Casey, After you get it all bright and shinny again,
then put on 2 layers of wide medical tape (you know
where to get that, free) Then change the tape when
it gets all messed up. The main wheel is throwing gravel
at your aft fuselage, also. SH solved this by using
a fender.
Cheers,
JJ

At 04:30 07 April 2005, Kilo Charlie wrote:
In Arizona we land on runways with lots of rocks.
Rocks probably help to
create some of our awesome conditions but they really
do a spanking on the
gelcoat.

My LS-8 has a fiberglass tail fairing....compound curves
and part of the
tail overall. The rocks are thrown into it from the
front and kicked up
from the tailwheel into the back section both causing
substantial damage
(chunks out of both front and back) to the fairing.

So....every couple of years I turn the fuselage over
and do some minor,
non-structural repairs to the fairing. The past couple
of years have been
especially harsh and so I took down the gelcoat to
the glass well beyond the
damaged section, glassed in a new and slighty beefier
fairing at both the
front and back sections. Having used gelcoat to finish
the job the last
time I spent way more time sanding down the gelcoat
than the rest of the
repairs.

So my question is.....is there a simpler way to do
this? Prestec or some
other paint maybe? Does the fact that it takes me
so long to finish the
gelcoat mean that I am doing it all wrong?

Thanks for the help in advance!

Casey Lenox
KC
Phoenix