Reply To: new forum member, new dormobile!
Hi Alan,
Congratulations on the Dormobile!
I recently finished Gelcoating my roof. It was covered with small, flaking blisters, though the fiberglass was waterproof. I wanted to prevent further deterioration.
Normally Gelcoat need not be painted. It can be polished. There are many sources of information turning up on “google”, now, including video on youtube on how to do it.
The reason I had to paint it was that the Gelcoat patch material wasn’t the same color as the roof. It was much “whiter”. The Gelcoat of the roof could have yellowed with age or it could have been originally a bit yellow as a matter of taste, I don’t know. You can mix pigments into the Gelcoat to avoid painting, but this is a black art.
I found my Gelcoat (comes in a tube) at a local yachting store (I live on Lake Zurich in Switzerland) for 25 Swiss Franks (ca. £12) per 250g and I used 500 g . The pigments were available at the hardware store but cost another 10 Franks per color and I didn’t have any idea whether I needed red, orange, yellow, or what.
I painted the roof with urethane which was incredibly difficult to work with, and expensive, another 100 Fr in paint, thinner, brushes and rollers!!
I forgot to mention the pain of removing two layers of paint that previous owners had put on the fiberglass roof (you can’t use heat to remove it so it is either nasty chemicals or scrape, sand, scrape, sand).
I don’t have the finished result yet on my website but here are the in-progress photos (note the color mismatch on the Gelcoat):
http://n.ethz.ch/~jhackney/lifting%20roof.html
Good luck, the rest of the car looks great!
Jeremy
