Compounding and Polishing Decks - Particularly Non-Skid

[Marshall Wright]

Greetings,
Tim, I've been following your progress on Bugs with great interest. Especially your work on her deck. I've mostly mastered, thanks to much of the advice on this site, compounding/polishing/waxing my hull but I've been confounded over what I should do about bringing back my deck - especially the non-skid sections. Like Bugs, my gelcoat is in really good condition for a 23 year old boat -- just oxidized and a little dirty looking. I'm confident that if I knew what to do, I could make it look much better. A couple of questions?

Do you use a buffer on the flat deck, cabin sides or other sections when compounding?
Or is this all hand work?
If you use a buffer, do you put down tape or something else to protect the edge of non-skid sections when working the flat sections? I ask because my buffer tends to jump around some when I'm buffing (even if I keep my compound material wet enough) and I was was concerned about tearing too deeply into the edge of a non-skid section if not careful.
What about the non-skid sections? What's the trick to really bringing non-skid areas back? Does this require a different approach to the flat sections?
If you rely on lots of hand work to work the compounds, what kind of pads do you use? Just a regular 3M polishing pad?

FWIW, I've thought about using a stiff bristle brush and carefully working through the compounding and polishing phases with small circular motions...... But I've never seen anyone suggest such an approach, so I've held off.

Any advice would be much appreciated as I'm pulling the boat the second week in November and would tackle this job right away before the weather sets in.

Thanks in advance,
Marshall

[Rachel]

This will be interesting to me. I had the same question when I was working on my M-17, only it was essentially pre-Internet, so I didn't have anyone to ask. I think I did end up using a bristle scrub brush.

The "lapstrake" hull was fun up on staging and with that big old Milwaukee buffer...

The next boats I did had teak decks so I have not done gelcoated non-skid since then.

Rachel

[Marshall Wright]

Greetings,
Is there any other way to bring back non-skid areas of the deck that are in good condition? Prior threads note grinding off the non-skid and painting.

Marshall

[Rachel]

Hi Marshall,

I don't know about other ways, but (and maybe I was unclear up above) I did bring back my non-skid decks that were in good shape except for some oxidation. I actually compounded, then polished, then waxed the entire boat. Well, I didn't wax the non-skid.

At any rate, it seemed to work well. I used a scrub brush and compound (I may also have used a few other implements as I experimented a bit).

I said I was interested to see what other people thought but that wasn't because the scrub brush didn't work (in case it sounded like that). It was more just because I was curious how others tackled it.

For the smooth parts of the deck I used the Milwaukee buffer/3M pad/compound just like on the topsides.

Rachel

[Marshall Wright]

Rachel, thanks for your input and advice. I'll try the brush this weekend.

Marshall