After overhearing a friend tell his wife that "Gary has a cool little camper, but boy does it need a bath." I decided it needed more than a bath. The gelcoat of the Scamp's fiberglass shell had become dull and caked with dirt and grime and tree sap etc.
I have been following various threads on restoring the shine to a fiberglass boat or camper, and the consensus is that it is a three step process. Clean and degrease, remove the "chalk", coat with floor polish.
Floor polish? ( See what happened two years later below)
Apparently through years of experimentation or desperation people have discovered that ZEP Hi-Gloss wet-look floor finish will make your fiberglass shine.
Now for a confession: I skipped step two. After power-washing the Scamp and scrubbing most of the grime off the next step is to scrub some more with Barkeeper's Friend. It is a powder, like Comet, but safe for fiberglass. this seemed like it should require power tools, and I promise I will get to it soon, but I wanted to see if the $30.00 gallon of floor polish would really work as advertised.
Before washing:
What do you think? The picture shows only one coat. Since I'm going to scrub it off I stopped at one coat, but the blogs say to use several thin coats for maximum shine. Check back in a few weeks to see the final 3-step results.
Fast forward a few years...
The Scamp is looking a bit worse for the wear. A year left uncovered under pine trees has left a huge amount of sticky black mess on the roof. And I noticed that the floor polish had begun to fail. It looked as though it was delaminating. This I don't have pictures of, but imagine if you will someone peeling after a bad sunburn... Anyway the clean part you see is about an hour's worth of power scrubbing with Barkeepers Friend and a green scrubby pad. I used a variable orbit car polisher, so as not to put too much pressure on the gelcoat. After Cleaning I applied a coat of a marine paste wax. It will need another coat.
