Old fiber glass repair

Submitted by Robert on Tue, 03/03/2015 - 18:46

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Hi, I have started stripping the old paint of the old mirror I acquired last year and it would seem there is a fiber glass patch over the top of the original paint work which has then been painted over. I have not had any experience in repairing dinghies so am in need of some help.

Will I have to remove the fiber glass repair and repair it again before I repaint or can I strip the paint from around it and sand the top of the repair before painting???

mirrorpete

Tue, 03/03/2015 - 21:09

If it was my boat I would carefully remove the fiber glass repair. Then I would take the paint under the repair off and sand it clean before I re-repaired it.

Pete

sail_and_oar's picture

sail_and_oar

Tue, 03/03/2015 - 22:43

Hello Robert,

Since you are undertaking the quite long process of a repaint and you have found an iffy previous repair it would be a shame not to attend to it but as you mentioned your boatbuilding skills may not currently be good enough for you to do this without some help.

The reality may be that the hull was in fact cleaned up properly for the fibreglass but the fibreglass patch was a bit big and overlapped the paint at it's edges. If the boat has been sailed quite a lot in this condition it may be acceptable to just paint over it again to see the year out. If it looks like a recent repair treat it with suspicion.

A proper repair to a hole in a Mirror is usually a plywood patch scarf jointed in. The materials to use are 5mm marine ply and marine grade epoxy resin. The process is to cut the hole into a rectangle, chamfer the edges back by an inch, cut a piece of ply with chamfered edges which fits accurately in the hole and glue it in place with epoxy. Once the Epoxy has set it should be as strong as the original panel and you can paint and varnish it. These repairs have been covered in detail in this forum in the past so have a look through some older posts. Some have links to blogs or videos which show how the work was done.

Occasional repairs are part of owning an older Mirror. The reward for this work is having one of the nicest to sail boats of it's type and size. When I bought mine in 2002 (I think) I had no boatbuilding knowledge and few carpentry skills. Over time I've replaced the centreboard case, the transom and done quite a few little repairs. There are a few of us on this forum in a similar position and between us we've done almost every repair imaginable. We can talk you through most of them.

Let us know how you get on and if you are unsure please ask,

Cliff

Robert

Wed, 03/04/2015 - 08:05

Thanks for your advice, as the edge is lifting where I have taken the paint of around the patch I think I will have to remove it.

Cheers Robert.