Refinishing gelcoat

Why aren't we doing this. It seems that you could DA sand
the wings in a few hours, shoot 200 bucks worth of primer,
sand the primer in a few hours and be ready for topcoat.


The issue of removing the old Gel Coat is generally a much bigger job
that most people realize the Gel Coat the quite hard and the composite
underneath is generally realtively soft and thin. So once you cut
through the Gel Coat the DA tends to quickly cut through the 1st
layer(s) of the composity very quickly weakening the structure. So
usually while a DA is carefully used to remove the majority of the
Gelcoat the last 10% of of it need to be carefully removed by hand
sanding to avoid damaging the composite.

Secondly those cracks in the Gel Coat as the get worse will transfer
into the Composit actually causing cracks in the Composite structure.
When removing the Gel Coat this can easily be seen as small white
cracks in the Epoxy itself. I have seen one aircraft that the 1st
layer of fiberglass had to be replaced because on all the cracks in
the fiberglass.

Even with Gelcoat the Materials are only a very small fraction of the
cost. The Majority of the cost is labor of removing the old Gel Coat.

Brian