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Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Shine bright like a diamond

Refurbishing a fiberglass Scamp 13.

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.