Impact on my hull

[Pro's Choice Pete]

Gentlemen, I was crawling around underneath my boat today and noticed this. It has probably been this way for a long time, but I have only owned it for 5 months. I want to fix it myself and have done some searches in this forum today, but couldn't find anything that showed how to fix something like this. So I am asking for help.



That is the starboard side near the bow just above the front of the center trailer bunk. It's a '94 Ranger 482VS. The overall length of the crack is about 8" and from chip to chip is about 3 1/2". From the right chip the crack exteds in an arc towards the right (front) but you can barely see it in the pic. Can I work some resin in there to seal it up for a while? We are planning on going to the lake this next weekend but don't want to screw anything up. When time allows I will fix it right so any help would be appreciated.

[dward51]

Even if you are going to just do a seal and patch job for now, you will still need to grind open those cracks. The resin is pretty thick and will not naturally flow up in there. Then I'm sure someone will suggest just throw some marinetex on it and rock on...

Correct way would be to grind/bevel the gel coat to expose the glass underneath and determine if the crack is just in the gel coat or if the fiberglass was damaged from the impact as well. Once you know the extent of the damage, the fix can be determined.

[BASSCAT7]

If you are just looking to seal it up for the weekend before you do a complete repair then clean out the chips with a dremel tool and just use either gelcoat or polyester resin to seal the chips/crack.
If you use Marine Tex for a temporary fix, it is an Epoxy and Epoxy will adhere really well to cured polyester resin but not the other way around.
So when you go to make the permanent repair you'll need to grind out all the epoxy so the polyester resin and gelcoat will adhere properly.

[Pro's Choice Pete]

Thanks for the info guys. What is the best Dremel bit to use for the temporary fix?