On to the Gelcoat for the top half!!

"Spot" treatment of hairline cracks. Use a dremel to drill it out, leaving a V-shaped profile to allow gelcoat to get in there. (you can see the hairline crack about the be ground out behind the grinding bit)

Ground out hairline crack.

In the middle/lower right, you can kind of see some filled lines. It will take a few coats of gelcoat to get them level with the finish and then they'll disappear.

Due to the condition of the gelcoat overall, I decided to spray gelcoat the entire top half. The easiest way to mask seemed to be on the inside, pinching the paper between the carpet and the fiberglass.

Not easy to do at first, but I developed a system. Get the top in, and pin through the two rivet holes to secure the top of the masking paper.

Then go inside, and slowly get the paper between the carpet and fiberglass. I needed to run a knife between to separate them. I'll reglue them when I put the windows back in. I'll use 3M Super 77 spray glue.

Pulling the carpet away to get the paper in.

Adding tape in a few spots to get it to stay.

Now... back to the beginning. This is an earlier photo of the outside of the Casita.

I decided to take of the decals. They left obvious lines, since they had been protecting the gelcoat from the sun, oxidizing and being dinged.

This is where I started to sand the whole thing. The oxidation and pitting was fairly significant. You can see the top back still has some shine, I hadn't gotten there yet.

Now I'm getting serious, windows are off and I'm committing to doing the whole thing to get it as perfect as I can.

Sanding and gelcoating areas.

Most repaired areas are gelcoated to bring the surface up to 'level' in those areas.

You can see the condition of the gelcoat at the top of this photo (and what removing a stripe left behind). I'm using a Festool orbital sander with 60 grit sandpaper. Knowing I'm going to recoat, I went aggressive. 120 also worked pretty well. (FYI... while expensive, the Festool sander is amazing for it's dust control system!!!)

A close up of sanding, with before at top, after at bottom.

Spraying gelcoat. Overall it went pretty well. There's more orange peel than I'd like. I used 1.5% MEKP, and thinned the mixture with 10% acetone to get it to spray better. My HVLP spray gun has a 1.4mm nozzle (smaller than ideal), and I was spraying at 40PSI with a compressor that is smaller than I should have for this (to provide sustained pressure). A wider nozzle, and a compressor with larger volume capacity would have been much better. I had to wait a fair amount on my compressor to get back to pressure during spraying. I was worried that my gelcoat would begin to harden in the gun, but it didn't. I sprayed about 900ml of it over about 20 minutes I think.

Looks good from a distance!

 

Top looks soooo much better. It started out all oxidized, pitted, sappy and dirty...

You can see the level of orange peel in these photos. I'm going to wipe it all down with acetone again to get the wax off (it's a gelcoat with wax in it that it needs to cure - it rises to the surface and forms a coating under which the curing happens) and give it another coat. That will ensure I have a good layer of gelcoat to allow some significant sanding. This time I'll start with 120 or a finer sandpaper. The goal is to take it down as little as possible to get the pits out.

More orange peel look on it. The next step is to put on another coat, and then get to sanding and finally buff it till it shines!!