Monday, May 12, 2014

Fiberglass cleaning and prep of everything


The weather finally got better!
EXTERIOR       Here's what Clementine is looking like today and this is how we've got here:

This is the flap of fiberglass that covers the front windows. It's called the rock guard. Pretty funky! Also pretty gunky. It has all these fibers coated in dirt.I took scotchbrite and sanded the dirt and fibers right down to smoothness. (I kept thinking that this was like the closest thing I could be doing to shaving the old girl's legs- I know- creeeeepy!)


Here she is mostly scotchbrited to smoothness. Next I painted it white using my favorite rustoleum. I chose white again, because it would keep the interior bright when sun shone through.

REAR EXTERIOR- 
 Here's the before:





Clementine was dirty. I scrubbed her up with a wash, a wash with TSP, a rinse and then some scotchbrite sanding, a rub down with a tack cloth and then a coat of paint. The pic below shows some of the progress. (sorry, I only painted the top half for this pic)
the aluminum edging is covered in grit and grime. Scotchbrite shined it right up.



INTERIOR--

This is the hatch to the electrical access. This is where Clementine can draw power from a car battery. in the lower picture, lower left, you can see that this geriatric gal is still sporting glass fuses and some REALLY sketchy looking wires. I'm going to remove all of this and next week outfit her to draw power from solar. And she'll do it with nice, friendly, new wires.

Also, structure of this box is shot. (Lower picture, bottom of wood is rotten and white molded)  I tore out old and built in new supports.

 Above is the picture of what that electric access box buts into on the interior. It's actually the support and base for the front bench, so it had to be rebuilt to be very solid.

I taped off interior and dove into painting the closet. White will be much better than poo brown. Notice the shelves- the walls of closet are mere paneling. To make the shelves strong, I put in horizontal supports and drilled them in from the outside in so that screw ends wouldn't be poking out of closet. Wire shelf was $5 for a 7' section. I cut it to size using massive bolt cutters with really long handles.
 Here's the back seat all stripped down and ready to be built back up + receive a coat of paint.

Happy Trails!