Using automotive lite weight "fillers"

GaryRI

Active member
Anyone using polyester resin based products like Evercote Lite Weight fillers for their projects?

Equivalent products are available at any autobody store for about 30 bucks a gallon. I "discovered" these "lite" bondo type products a couple years ago when I did some body work on 1979 IH Scout summer car. These products are super easy to deal with - sand down fast. Before this I had only used the traditional multistrand bondo products that cure superhard.

Reason I ask:

I want to redo the fiberglass covering of an old canoe I fiberglassed in the early 70s & lite filler seems like a great cheap solution to fair over the hull before recovering it.

I already "searched" this site & saw a bunch of postings indicating epoxy products cover polyester just fine. And from the last 40 odd years this canoe has been around I observe that cheap polyestr based products can work just fine. This being true, it seems safe to assume that polyester resin cloth will stick to "lite" filler.

In about 1972 I retreived a sunk traditional canvas covered canoe out of a lake. It was in the shallows with both ends just above water. It had been there long enough that ends were rotted. I took it home and stripped the canvas & trim off. Everything except the ends were still solid so I used some 1/4 inch plywood to replace the rotted sections, faired the patched areas in with automotive bondo & glassed over the whole thing without concerning myself with smoothing over the surface. I may have used the canoe once or twice before giving it to my Dad & brothers. It has been hanging in my folks garage now for at least 20 years. One of my brothers used it alot and as primative as my skills were, it didn't leak.

I actually forgot about it but remembered I kinda sorta own a canoe when I started contemplating a new mobile duck boat hunting project.
 
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