Polynesian pool fiberglass walls and top edge needs refinished

[polynesianpool]

I have a 16x32 kidney shaped inground Polynesian brand pool with a low- hung liner. It was installed almost 30 years ago and needs some repair work done on the walls which are fiberglass. There are bubbles on the wall panels some worse than others and the top edge that wraps over the top edge and looks like white tile coping has hairline cracks from being exposed to the sun for all this time. Can I paint it with epoxy paint to freshen it up and will it fill the hairline cracks? Any help is appreciated. Last year I replaced the low-hung liner and repainted the exposed wall that looks like blue tile with epoxy paint and it looks pretty good so far.

Thanks
Vince

[Sean OBrien]

I have a similar problem that I have been trying to get a handle on. Apparently repairs are not that far removed from doing body work on a fiberglass bodied boat (many of the same materials from what I have seen as well). We have a polynesian pool (fiberglass coping, walls and low hung vinyl liner) with similar problems to what you describe. I won't be tackling the repairs on that though till this fall/winter.

What I have managed to glean thus far is that about half of the damage is in the gel coat/surface treatment. These will be the hairline cracks that you describe. The gelcoat is sort of like the candy coating on the M&M - it's primary purpose is just to look good. Repair on the gel coat is just like repairing the gel coat on a boat (one guy I talked to used marine gel coat materials, a different guy was using one specifically designed for swimming pools - I haven't had a chance to research the materials to see if there is an actual difference between the two though).

The other issues are damage to the actual fiberglass itself. I have a couple of spots on the coping where it looks like the fiberglass wasn't properly supported from the bottom and it actually cracked. On these, the pool guy was using a material that looked like body filler (it was a 3M product - but I didn't get the actual name on the can). With that he was using it in much the same way that you would on a car or boat. Apply, shape, sand and then paint the whole thing with the gel coat once it had cured.

The final problem that he mentioned was more substantial damage to the panels. On those they would apparently sand and reglass the whole panel in order to prevent the patch from delaminating. Didn't see them doing any of that work when I was talking to them, but I have done it before myself on boats - so it isn't entirely foreign.

The long short seems to be that you can not get replacement fiberglass parts (coping, wall panels and the like) as readily as you can get the replacement vinyl liners. Makes sense, the fiberglass needs molds and all of that, whereas the liner is just cut to size from big rolls. It also appears that all the repairs are pretty much handled like any other fiberglass repairs. One thing that I am not too sure about is how well a regular gel coat (say for a boat) will hold up to chlorinated water compared to the specially formulated swimming pool gel coat. When shopping around for prices, it appears that the swimming pool gel coats are two-three times more expensive than regular ones and I will likely want to redo all the panels in order to maintain color uniformity.