Fiberglass canoe repair

[Anonymous No.2623564]

im looking to buy a canoe and found one for cheap but it has cracks on the outside of it. owner claims the cracks dont leak but id still like to repair them if I pick the canoe up. how much time and how much would it cost to repair these cracks? ive never worked with fiberglass before.

[Anonymous No.2623567]

If they don't leak, it's probably just gel coat cracks from sitting in the sun. Float/fill it with water to make sure. If so, there's a bunch of different ways to do it. Most involve removing material with a dremel or sander, filling, and repainting. Sometimes really small ones you can literally just paint over.

[Anonymous No.2623748]

Canoes are usually pretty easy since there's no tricky corners, repairs are generally just sanding all the paint off around the damaged area, grinding away any broken fiberglass fibers and making a nice taper for a scarf joint, then layering on new stuff in increasing sized patches until you've got decent overlap with solid area, on both the inside and outside if you're making structural repairs, then sand it all smooth and repaint
Price depends on the size but resin and cloth is kinda pricey, might be ~50$ if you can get away with buying the smallest can of resin and pack of cloth and don't care too much about the paint, might be >200$ if you want to do a really thorough job and patch the gelcoat all nice. Get woven roving not chopped strand mat, it costs a little more but not significant for small repairs of this size and it's 20x nicer to work with.