Philip, I have not used glass tape in my keel repairs, and that is to your benefit and my loss. Without tape, the job I did ended up brittle and is friable enough it crunches more easily than the factory job on adjacent surfaces. Truth to tell, I strongly prefer to work in epoxy, but vanity seized me, and I tried to match the shade of the surrounding gel coat. Waste of time, I now know. If I did it again, I'd go with hand-cut tape and epoxy. I prefer to cut my own tape from cloth, so there is no woven edge to form a ridge. I suppose bias-cut tape might avoid that, but it costs more. The strip in the SK article looked darn good, next to my job. -- Dave Kruger Astoria, OR ----- Original Message ----- Philip <kayakwriter_at_netscape.net> wrote: > I'm still thinking about this. Aside from the simplicity (always appealing > to the lazy), the gel-coated-only strip as suggested in the online article > seemed to have the virtue of being coloured all the way through, so scuffs > wouldn't show up as much. On the other hand, you gotta think there are > reasons they don't build entire kayaks outta merely gelcoat impregnated > fibreglass. But perhaps epoxy's strength, critical in a complete boat, is > less vital in a keel strip,Received on Thu Dec 23 2004 - 11:05:42 PST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:31:19 PDT