I Learned Something

This past weekend I ended up getting a lot more done on the Vanagon than I was anticipating. I sanded and painted my rear bumper and I solved a major problem with my window seals. On Saturday I hurriedly painted the rear bumper and I am not very happy with it at all. There was some fairly serious surface rust on it and I didn't have a grind wheel in good enough condition to really clean it up. I ended up using a wire wheel which is good at getting out all the rust but it leaves the metal riddled with pits where the rust used to be. I thought a high build rattle can auto primer that I have been using would be enough to clean it up but I was wrong. Sadly the pits show through the final satin black paint so I think I'm going to have to strip it down again and use some filler to get it all sorted out.

The better news though is that I figured out how to fix up my window rubbers. Early on in the painting process I masked them all off and left the tape on for a week. It was really hot that week (wow I have been at this stupid paint job for a long time) and the adhesive from the masking tape kind of melded with the rubber in the window seals. That left me with tape that I simply could not peel off. I ignored it for a while but it has gotten to the point where that tape was starting to really annoy me. My general approach to restoration is to just fix whatever is annoying me the most at that time so this weekend I decided to do something about it.

My first plan was to use some Goo Gone and a rag to scrub off that adhesive. That did pretty much nothing. Next I tried using a plastic pot scrubber - nothing. Then I tried some steel wool - nothing. Next I tried a small wire brush - that was just scratching the hell out of my rubbers so I quickly ditched that idea. Finally I decided to try some sand paper and kind of wet sand with Goo Gone instead of water. That was working but it took a really long time on the places where there was a lot of tape left. However I noticed that the sand paper left the rubber looking nice and new and it was able to easily remove the overspray from my previous owners horrible paint job and the few places here and there where I got paint on the rubbers. The trouble was keeping the sand paper off of the body since I didn't want to scratch the paint. That was when I noticed the small dry wall putty knife that I had in the tool box. It is a 1" knife that I noticed I could easily slide under the edge of the rubber and then could go to town on rubber lip with the sand paper and really clean it up. I also noticed that the blade had enough flex to it that I could use it to scrape up the bulk of the old masking tape without harming the rubbers. So in the end my process was to use the putty knife to scrape as much of the masking tape off as possible and then use it to lift the lip while I sanded the rubber down a bit with 120 grit sand paper. Once I had taken a layer off of the window rubber I used some 303 Aerospace Protectant to reseal the rubber and protect it from UV damage. This left my rubbers looking like new!