“The glass reinforcement is highly specialized and is added to the resin.
“It’s a multi-pronged attack to bring it all together,” he says. Ultimately, he says, the concept boils down to three major components: the materials, the process and the equipment. After surface prep and a primer coat, which uses the same spray system, the mixture is applied using a system designed specifically for the application. Rather than applying the resins and fiber in separate application processes, Gibson developed a formula that includes glass fibers that are mixed with the resin and catalyst and thus sprayed on all at the same time. While the GlassCoat material and application process is derived from existing fiberglass coatings, it is different in several ways. The hiatus of not working with the material somehow made it much easier to conceptualize the process.” The earlier work I did made the transition from chop fiberglass to GlassCoat much easier. “I gained a wealth of knowledge and information along the way. “It has been a long, arduous journey, with many iterations to get to this point,” he says. After a few years, as the market improved, Gibson returned to the concept, which he finally introduced two years ago. As was true for many in the industry, the economic downturn stymied his progress, at least for a time. He began working on the first versions of the GlassCoat system about 10 years ago, right before the 2008 recession. Despite the many finish products available, the entire industry, he believed, still lacked a suitable coating option.įiberglass polymer composite resurfacing MOTHER OF INVENTION Through that experience he came to believe that traditional fiberglass technology was too expensive, too tricky to apply and ultimately unreliable. in 1988 where he continued his work developing and applying a variety of coatings in pools and elsewhere, including spray-on fiberglass surfaces used in a small percentage of pools and spas. “Pools are largely a cement-based industry, but if you look at most other industries, they’ve been using polymeric materials for decades,” he says.
Gibson, a native of South Africa, started in the coatings industry in 1981 working in his home nation’s gold mines, applying various coatings to concrete tanks.
“Practically everyone in the industry has known about all the various plaster problems for decades, but no one in the pool and spa world knows anything about how it’s done in the industrial coatings field.” “I’ve always been focused on finding better ways to solve problems,” Gibson says. Based on technology used by the industrial coatings industry, GlassCoat is a polymeric coating re-purposed specifically for the pool and spa industry. That’s why he has spent years pursuing such an alternative, an effort that led to invention of GlassCoat. He passionately believes the inherently corrosive environment of pool and spa water demands an impervious alternative to plaster, exposed aggregates, paint, vinyl and traditional fiberglass coatings. The pool and spa industry desperately needs a new interior-finish alternative, at least according to coatings specialist and inventor Peter Gibson. Excerpt from Aqua Magazine featuring our Expert Specifying / Corrosion Engineer Peter Gibson Polymer Composite A Polymer Solution to Pool Finish Challenges
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