Gel Coat Quality Starts Here
As a technical service manager at CCP, part of Linda Bergstrom’s job is to train manufacturers on best practices for material handling and gel coat application. “A large part of the composites industry uses gel coat. It ends up being the cosmetic surface on your laminate, and customers are paying a lot of money for it,” she says, “so manufacturers ought to take the steps needed to do it properly.”
Bergstrom is bringing her expertise to Las Vegas, where she’ll lead a session at Composites 2010 called Gel Coat: Quality Starts Here. “We’re going to talk about mixing and temperature control, thickness control, equipment set up and maintenance, as well as when you should repair a gel coat and when you should leave it alone.”
By sharing information at the show, Bergstrom hope to prevent manufacturers from repeating some of the more egregious practices she’s encountered. “There are some folks that will take a pale of gel coat or a drum of gel coat and move it from raw material storage by rolling it and consider that their mixing,” she says. “Some people will use air lines and think that the air lines and the bubbling are mixing. These are not what we mean by mixing.”
