Blue Fiberglass?

[mccloud]

I've begun stripping blue fiberglass off an old w/c canoe, builder unknown. Actually there are two layers of glass plus paint on top, and the good news is that with the heat gun and a putty knife, the glass is coming off fairly easily with little wood coming along with it. But what puzzles me is that the coarse layer of glass which is against the wood is dark blue, all the way thru to the wood. I'm not aware of any resin that is blue. Maybe someone added blue pigment to the resin thinking that would look just fine and paint over the top would not be needed??? Whomever did this glassing did not take off the keel or outwales, but just tucked the fiber up along-side. That does make it easier to remove. It was a rough, lumpy, poor glassing job. Tom McCloud

 

[Todd Bradshaw]

It is not all that unusual for fiberglass boat manufacturers to color the resin with opaque pigments, especially in the case of the final layer of cloth in the mold, which then becomes the inside surface of the canoe's hull. The advantage over a painted interior is that if you ever need to patch the hull, you can sand right into the area around the break and don't have to try to remove interior paint in order to get a clean fiberglass area to bond the repairs to. Norm Sims had one of the first (and few) fiberglass 17' Hazen Micmac canoes ever built back when we sold Wilderness Boats. It was white outside and a pretty bright blue inside.

It could be that the person who glassed your canoe got some pigmented resin, or even used gelcoat for the job. Gelcoat is just resin, pigment and some filler like talc. Though not the ideal laminating resin, it is still liquid enough to saturate fiberglass cloth. I used to buy it from a boat company for $5 per gallon as long as you brought your own jug, back when I was a sculpture major in college.