See this rock? I didn't.

[gumpus]

So yesterday I ran my trusty Merlin II directly into a barely submerged boulder. I think I just need to sand the impact area a bit to make sure anything loose comes off and then repair with epoxy or clear gelcoat. I have some clear gelcoat on hand and epoxy is easy enough to get. If I use gelcoat should I just apply freehand and then smooth it out after hardening or try the Saran Wrap approach or maybe buy some of the peel/ply tape that someone posted about recently. Is there any reason to favor an epoxy repair over gelcoat? I like the way the epoxy repair came out on the Flashfire thread and we do have Saran Wrap in the house.

 

[lowangle al]

Ouch, did it leak?

 

[Alan Gage]

How about more of a close up (the boat, not the rock). I would expect the only damage to be to the gel coat. That part of the hull, due the shape and (likely extra layers) of cloth, is very robust.

Alan

 

[Guest]

then smooth it out after hardening or try the Saran Wrap approach or maybe buy some of the peel/ply tape that someone posted about recently.

I have had less than satisfactory wrinkly results with Saran Wrap, especially atop complex curves, albeit not atop gel coat.

I would be happy to mail you a couple feet of that release treated peel ply tape, at least it is “breathable”, and maybe (?) better for use with gel coat that needs air exposure to cure. I have enough peel ply tape to spare a couple feet

DougD received his half of the roll we split and, even with suffering another mailman delivery embarrassing faux label, kept saying “I LOVE THIS STUFF!”.

P7120002 by Mike McCrea, on Flickr

Doug is an easily excitable fellow. Word of honor I will put no such faux label on a simple stamped envelope of 4” peel ply tape.

The Canoe Tripping Private Message function is still unavailable to me. You can hit me up with a message on CCR, or try this G.mail jumble with your mailing address – my last name plus paddler. No caps, all one word, + the usual Gmail suffix.

 

[yellowcanoe]

How about more of a close up (the boat, not the rock). I would expect the only damage to be to the gel coat. That part of the hull, due the shape and (likely extra layers) of cloth, is very robust.

Alan

Yup. But who can resist the prospect of getting a Winky-Dink?

 

[Alan Gage]

I would be happy to mail you a couple feet of that release treated peel ply tape, at least it is “breathable”, and maybe (?) better for use with gel coat that needs air exposure to cure. I have enough peel ply tape to spare a couple feet

I believe it's the other way around. Unwaxed gel coat (or poly/vinyl ester resin) needs a lack of air exposure to cure. Leave it exposed to the air and it stays tacky on the surface. Cover it with plastic (or wax mixed in with the resin) and it will cure hard.

But peel ply could still come to the rescue. Perhaps the tacky layer would be removed with the peel ply.

Alan

 

[Guest]

who can resist the prospect of getting a Winky-Dink?

Sadly Doug’s longstanding mail lady Tara, who was in on and enjoying the decade-long joke, is no longer delivering to his area. After the first package, which Tara flung disgustedly onto Doug’s porch, she made a point of walking every embarrassing box up to his door to personally hand it to him.

The replacement mail guys, eh, they all think Doug is a stone Rick James super-freak.

On my end the usual mail person at my local Post Office immediately flips over every package, and is visibly disappointed when I mail a box to someone else, without some batshit crazy “Company label” on the backside. That alone makes it worth mailing stuff to Doug.

I mailed Doug a simple envelope letter a week ago, cut and pasted pieces of White House letterhead, with Presidential sharpie signature at the bottom. I have no photocopier. The Library is still closed; the only “public” photocopier I could find was at the local pharmacy.

I wandered around the pharmacy for a spell and spotted no photocopier, so I asked where it might be located.

“Oh, it’s behind the pharmacy counter. Just give it to the pharmacist; she’ll make copies for you”

I handed the page over and hastily explained that “This is a joke, I swear”, and asked for two copies. Reading it on her way back to the photocopier she was already laughing, and I watched her make three copies, I presume two for me, one for her.

That faux label stuff has been going on for years now, and I am proud to have a Wall-of-Infamy displayed in Doug’s shop.

 

[Turtle2]

I use g-flex for this-gellcoat didn't work as well. i did this several times to my merlin and other canoes. darn rocks just jump in front of you or you steer to miss them and actually hit them anyway. As an aside, I once t-boned a rock square and hard enough to throw me out of my canoe with surprisingly no damage. I was in my savage river wee lassie which has an epoxy resin layup. not badfor a 17# canoe!

 

[Guest]

Aside from helping friends do gel coat work (read watching) I have little experience with either waxed or unwaxed gel coat.

I have used G/flex for similar and larger/deeper gel coat damage and, like Turtle’s experience, it has worked well. The only issue with G/flex has been an aesthetic one; I’ve had to thicken the G/flex, especially on complex curved stems, so it didn’t creep out of the void, first taping a coffer dam around the perimeter of the void to hold it built-up in place.

The silica thickened G/glex was milky colored. Clear gel coat would be less noticeable.

The gel coat we have laid on less deep damage has cracked off much more easily than G/flex; something in the chemistry of gel coat doesn’t like thin.

 

[Guest]

A thought on this using G/flex or other epoxy. If thickening the epoxy with silica or the like you could pigment the epoxy mix to something less fugly than milky white.

I wish I had thought of that before putting untinted thickened epoxy in deep gel coat voids.

 

[gumpus]

Ouch, did it leak?

It did not leak but I could hear a little abnormal noise from the bow as I continued on my paddle so I suspected the boat might be injured. It's taken lots of rock hits in the last 20 years but this one was nastier than most.

 

[gumpus]

How about more of a close up (the boat, not the rock). I would expect the only damage to be to the gel coat. That part of the hull, due the shape and (likely extra layers) of cloth, is very robust.

Alan

It's all in the gelcoat and as you say it's very thick in that area.

 

[gumpus]

My thanks to all of you for your thoughts. Mike - thank you for the generous offer. I may take you up on it but for now I'll just say thanks. I parked the boat since I have others I can use and I wanted to think about the repair. I have some nice outings planned in the next week but hope to get to it next week during the cooler weather. I'm leaning towards epoxy as turtle recommends since I think it should be stronger than gelcoat but in my experince the gelcoat may flow better into any cracks so I still haven't decided. When I rammed the boat into a concrete barrier a couple years ago (that I thought was a stick) and popped out a couple tiny pieces of gelcoat I fixed it with clear gelcoat and that worked great since it flowed into the two small wounds nicely. I expect that whether I use epoxy or gelcoat I'll have to do a little sanding and reshaping to get it right. I'll post pics when it's done.

The river level has been dropping to levels that are unusually normal and there are lots of boulders becoming visible and threatening in my normal paddling zone which is often less than 10 feet from the shore. Took the Yellowstone Solo this morning and stayed a little further from shore.

 

[Guest]

It did not leak but I could hear a little abnormal noise from the bow as I continued on my paddle

I think it is one of the wonderful parts of paddling that all of our senses are so heighten and in play.

Not just hearing the sound of the hull cutting through the water, sight of a soaring bird, touch of paddle in water, smell of deer carcass in logjam (don’t step out on that, it ain’t no furry log). Even taste of lake water, hopefully distant from the rotting deer.

Obviously the sense of balance, equilibrioception. And part of that is the perception of where your body parts are in time and space, Proprioception.

Hot/cold sensations, thermoception. One thing I kinda miss about being barefoot in an aluminum canoe is feeling the water temperature change when turning off the lake into some creek.

Sense of pain, nociception. Time for some outfitting improvements.

Sense of time, Chronoception. Or even better yet the absence of everyday sense of time, beyond it’s the sense that it’s getting dark/it’s getting light/I’m getting hungry. Yeah, thirst and hunger are sensations too.

Back to auditory senses; so much as a maple leaf trapped against the bow will get my “What the heck is that noise” attention. And, once noticed, become intolerable until I back up and dislodge it.

 

[Alan Gage]

If it was mine I'd probably brush on some unthickened epoxy to soak into any cracks or exposed cloth and then fill it with thickened epoxy tinted with graphite powder from the hardware store, which would do a pretty good job of matching the rest of the boat. I'd leave the first layer of thickened epoxy, which would be a really thick consistency, a little below the surface of the hull. Then mix up a small batch that was still thick but a bit more workable to do the final fill (might take a couple coats of that), using a plastic squeegee as a screed to limit the amount of sanding necessary.

Alan

 

[gumpus]

Thank you Alan

 

[Guest]

then fill it with thickened epoxy tinted with graphite powder from the hardware store, which would do a pretty good job of matching the rest of the boat

I like that idea. Assuming it has the same fine flyaway granularity better to spend $3 on a couple grams of graphite powder than $20 on a 12oz can from West System. Although, I thought the can of West graphite powder would last a lifetime, and recently bought my second can.

Along those same alternative lines, has anyone tried using acrylic paint in place of color agent to pigment epoxy?

I have heard that a small dab of acrylic paint will do same job, and little pallets of acrylic artist paints are much less expensive than individual tubes of pigment.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/12-Color-...ment/721166555

 

[dougd]

I have used paint mixed in with resin and it works pretty good especially when mixed with the graphite powder. I have only used black but it sure helps get a "richer" color. I find the powder by itself comes out a little dingy. Just my observations.

dougd

 

[Guest]

The flashfire thread was mentioned, so I will throw in my 2 cents.

The key to the cling wrap method is to use minimal, not very much, gflex. Because, when you stretch the wrap, the epoxy will "creep" farther out than you think it will. The outer margin is where one is likely to experience the dreaded winky dink. The smaller the ding, the better this method works. The dings on the stem of the flashfire were quarter and dime sized.

On the flashfire, I did indeed get a tiny winky dink out on the margins. I used a smidge too much gflex. The winky dink got sanded out in a minute or two, to oblivion.

I tend to overthink things (as you will see in the upcoming addition to the flashfire thread). I have some blue-green fabric that I believe is peel ply from Jamestown. I used it once and it did not work very well. My memory is hazy, but I think that I left it on too long. I started to do a test with the peel ply. The dreaded delay.

Forget that! I impulsively decided to violently execute a good plan now. By violently, I mean the repair was done with almost no brainpower expended, in less than 10 minutes. Look at the blue tape in the photo, haha. Violently!

"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." George Patton

 

[Guest]

I have used paint mixed in with resin and it works pretty good especially when mixed with the graphite powder. I have only used black but it sure helps get a "richer" color. I find the powder by itself comes out a little dingy. Just my observations.

I have never used just graphite powder in an epoxy mix in boatwork, but have always added a bit of black pigment. That graphite and color agent mix is the blackest of black. dang near Vantablack.

And black all the way through the fabric. West graphite powder is superfly, so light weight that it wants to loft near aerosol if mixed too vigorously.

Despite that fine granularity I don’t think the all graphite particles fully saturates some fabrics. On some of the skid plate test panels there was some Oreo-cookie business going on when I cut the material, especially the two layer Dynel sleeve down the middle. It didn’t look like the graphite powder had seeped into the fabric as fully as the epoxy itself on either side of the material.

BTW, graphite powder on “either side” was unnecessary. I made one pot of epoxy with graphite powder and pigment, painted the hull, laid the cloth, topcoated it and laid/compressed peel ply.

I might make two separate pots next time; bottom coat epoxy and black pigment, top coat with graphite powder added. I don’t think graphite powder on the bottom is doing much, and the black pigment alone fully saturates the material.

Someone on the board used an old tube of auto-store graphite powder with unsatisfactory results. That may have been coarser grained powder, or perhaps graphite powder in plastic tubes ages out eventually.

The first can of West graphite powder lasted 10 years, and was good to the last drop.