dri-dek alternatives?

[schoonerdog]

I've noticed that dri-dek is making small little indentations in the fiberglass in our cockpit and have a couple questions. I imagine I could very easily take some sort of filler and fill these holes or I could look for some sort of dry deck alternative. Anyone know of anything that could fill the bill of being easily installed, low maintanence, and still look ok? Has anyone seen this issue and fixed it on their own boat?

[colemj]

I'm surprised about that and haven't noticed it on ours, although I only have it in a foot well and never really remove it much to check. By holes in the fiberglass, do you really mean just the gelcoat? Even then, I would have expected the rubber-like dri-dek to be softer than the gelcoat. One possibility is that small, frequent slight movement might be slowly grinding away the gelcoat where the little nubs contact it.

Mark

[schoonerdog]

it's going deeper than just the gelcoat. I don't necessarily think it's a hardness issue but a point of pressure issue. The small cleat footings of the drydeck I think put too much point pressure on the fiberglass (which is afterall plastic) and gradually creates indentations. With people taking giant steps from the seat down the cockpit flow, often jumping down, and it's a lot of pressure on a very small area.

[imagine2frolic]

This is interesting, because I am using dri-dek in my chain locker. I rebuilt the locker because of soft wood. The boat is cold molded. The last thing I did was glass in the bottom & sides. Sheeting the sides with plastic sheets, and leaving the dri-dek on the bottom for water drainage. I will have to look for indentations on the bottom glass. I would hate for it to dig into the wood again......

[schoonerdog]

I don't think this is actually anything more than an annoyance, the fiberglass isn't penetrated but indented, I'm thinking one possible solution might be to just take something like marine tek or colloidial filler and epoxy and fill in the dents and be done with it.

[schoonerdog]

now that I take a closer look, I think it might be just them rubbing on the paint a bit. I don't think it's anything at all.