color sanding gelcoat

I have been buffing my boat with rubbing compound, and many areas are still faded and chalky. Do I need to keep buffing, or should I look into sanding. If so, what grit, and is this something that I need to wetsand.

I wet sanded my boat yesterday. It sucks! I did a three stage process. I started off w/1000, then 1500 and finished it w/2000 grit paper. After that I washed boat and applied a fiberglass compound then wax. It came out looking 100 times better than before. Luckily my boat is mostly white so I so I only wet sanded the colored areas. Took a good 5-6 hours.

How wet do you keep the boat while sanding? Any precautions I need to take? What kind of fiberglass compound did you use and what purpose does it serve?

If you get some good 3M finess or perfect-it rubbing compound you'll only need to do 1000gt or 1500gt if you want to use less compound. No matter how bad it is 1000gt will get it clean. Be careful, especially on edges not to go through the color. Then go to harbor freight and get a good buffer (the orange ones are only like $40 and work just great). And when wet sanding, keep it very wet(I dip the block every small section I do). Anyways, good luck.

Do I use the sandpaper in conjunction with the rubbing compound (I wouldn't think you would) or after sanding? I tried a buffer with rubbing compound and it worked pretty well, but some areas are still hazy. Thanks for the replies.

No, you use each product as part of its own step. Chris Anthony offered some good advice, this is the order:

Wet sand, then rubbing compound, then polishing compound (Finess or Perfect-It as recommended by Chris works well), then (finally) wax. The idea is that with each step, you're going to progressively less abrasive cleaners - each step takes out smaller & finer scratches & imperfections. It'll take some work, but it'll be worth it.

Or you could find a good detailer to do all of that for you.

Anyone know how thick the gel color actually is? Thanks

I'd never done it before and didn't do any research before hand.. I saw them do it on Trucks on Spike TV! Anyways, I don't really think the three steps I did was necessary.. Two would've worked.

As far as wetting it. I had a big car wash sponge in one hand, a bucket next to me and the sanding block in the other. I kept the sponge and area I was working on sopping wet so there so not too much friction..That's what they were doing on TV!

The gel-coat thickness is a tricky one. In solid color boats it should be about 25-30mils thick. Now relatively how thick is a mil in sanding terms, well its hard to describe but with 1000gt paper it will take a good bit of work to burn through it. With 220 you can burn through in 4 or 5 passes(its a lot thicker than car paint but still not that thick). Anyways, that’s if the boat is a solid color. In multiple color boats, the colors are layered with the outermost layers being as thin as 5mils, then backed up to a total thickness of 25-30mils. Then you have the previous repair business. If you have a used boat then there is no good way to tell how many times it has been color sanded or repaired. I guess the moral of the story is just be careful when sanding. I would never use over 1000gt paper when trying to bring color back. It should only take 2 or 3 passes with 1000gt paper to bring back the shine(no matter how bad it is), in most cases 1 pass will do it. And when wet sanding you don't really need to keep the area soaked, but keep the paper wet. You'll know you need to dip the block again when it gets hard to move on the surface(feels like the block is sucking down on the surface). It will help to have a squeegee by to clean the area you’ve just completed to make sure it is a nice even sand. Be careful with your edges, always keep your soft block flat, if you start to use the edges you will leave lines that will be hard to remove in the next step(meaning you’ll have to go back and resand the area later). All right this post is simply too long now. Hope my info helps…

Thanks for the help, I also got my tower today, so I guess I will be sanding on Saturday and installing a tower on Wednesday.