Years of use leaves scratches, dings and dents. I wanted to at least get rid of some of the dings and deeper scratches so I tried a couple of ideas that I saw on YouTube. I’d already tried re-melting and fixing the the hole with heat, so I used the heat gun to soften the poly and a putty knife to smooth the deeper scratches. This kind of worked, I guess. There were so many scratches that it turned out to be a lot of work for little satisfactory results. I picked out the worst and deepest scratches and let the others go.
I mixed some really strong soap and started scrubbing. Amazingly, that had better effect on the scratches. By cleaning the dirt out, the scratches became less obvious.
In the picture below you can see the point at which I stopped scrubbing. Amazing what a little elbow grease can do.
Once the whole boat was clean, I used a trick that I found suggested on multiple web sites. Applying boiled linseed oil to the poly kind of restores the finish a little. And I think it actually worked. It was like applying Gold Bond to my skin.
I used a cut-down disposal chip brush
