Speed Boat Detailing: Gel Coats

Video Transcript

"Hi it's Dow here at the Fire House Detail Shop today we're teaching you how to detail your motor boat like a professional. We just finished cleaning the exterior of the boat, we've removed hard water, we've dressed our tires, and protected our wheels. Now we're going to evaluate the actual gel coat on the boat. Nice thing about gel coat is unlike automotive paint, it's a very durable surface. It's a fiberglass underneath and this gel coat, although it can scratch. Of course none of like to run into the boat dock or have a jet ski bump into us, or the different things that happen to scratch up or gel coat. You know you can leave it in the dock over night and the buoy's can get sand on them and they'll scratch your gel coat, really dull the finish. It's a easy surface to work with. We can typically bring back the luster and the shine just by polishing it. Of course the best way to prevent that from happening is to make sure you've got a good protective coat. So we're always going to want to wax this, we're going to go through that step. Right now we're evaluating to see how bad scratches are, any kind of swirl marks that maybe have been put in it, any kind of abrasions on it. And then we're going to know what to do as we move in and do this. Of course we're going to apply a coat of wax, but we've found on this boat a couple of swirl marks around the decals. Now the thing we do have to be careful with on a boat is decals. These are not part of the gel coat. If we hit these with a buffer, if we hit them with something that's abrasive at all we can just peel those right off. Of course they're an important part of the look, and the feel, you know a nice power boat, a weight boarding and skiing boat like this. So we want to be really cautious to not have those come off. What we found here is we're going to have to do a little bit of swirl mark removal. We'll go through those steps and then we're going to come back and put a coat of wax on this, and we'll talk about that in another segment."