Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Kurt Selisch on February 22, 2015 at 6:40pm

Hi Dustin,

Aluminum is a soft metal. So...if you happen to run over a rock or over a gravel bar, your boat will not slide over and off but will grab and stick. A lot of people running metal boats apply a coating to the bottom like gluvit or a truck bed liner product to alleviate this problem. I would go the epoxy and glass cloth route, it is fairly inexpensive and not that hard to do. You can mix graphite into the last coat of epoxy and it makes a super hard and slick bottom.  www.raka.com has reasonable prices.  Good luck with your build! Kurt

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Permalink Reply by Bill Kirkpatrick on February 23, 2015 at 6:16pm

Dustin:

I've had good luck with Coat-It epoxy applied to the bottom of my old boat without glass cloth.

http://www.tapplastics.com/product/fiberglass/epoxy_resins/coat_it_...

Its available at Bi-Mart.

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Permalink Reply by Dustin Adams on February 23, 2015 at 8:33pm

Thanks Bill I had looked at using coat-it over glass and was curious on using it alone. How many coats do you put on your boat?

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Permalink Reply by Bill Kirkpatrick on February 24, 2015 at 8:44am

Dustin:

I just put one coat on the first time (10 or 12 years ago).  Since then, I've sanded and re-coated it twice.

The re-coats were needed because I fish the Sandy River at Troutdale and drag the bottom a lot (the Sandy can get really shallow and the river bottom is mostly sand and gravel).

Coat-It is really slow to dry in cold weather, so I try to schedule my re-coats in the summer.

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