TotalBoat Ambassadors Kent and Audrey Lewis from Small Boat Restoration in Florida did a great blog post about how to patch a hole in fiberglass. These pesky holes happen from time to time when boats are hit or damaged and a large hole is left in your otherwise smooth fiberglass hull. There is an “easy” way to repair these gaping holes, when, of course, you know how.
Small Boat Restoration is very adept at repairs like these, especially on Sunfish, and they do a top notch job explaining and showing you how to execute this repair on their blogpost found here. Because holes can often be too large to patch with a superficial job on the outside, it’s best to get something on the inside of the hull that you can use to back or reinforce the patch.
Check out the well executed repair and their detailed instructions on how to do your own at home. Using Thixo makes the whole process easier for smaller repairs because you can forget about the mess of mixing and thickening epoxy for a strong structural repair, while you have hands full doing clamping, cutting, wetting out, etc.
Kent and Blair also showcase their super helpful tip for making clamps out of PVC pipe to help hold down the gunwale area where they have patched. Kent does a nice job explaining how and why he found this ingenious method and how he thinks it works for his project.
Read all about how they executed their fix and watch their videos below about how they got it done.