Here Today, Gone Today......

I'm determined to put the decals/checkers behind me, it's a job I've been dreading after my first attempt last Autumn. As you know, in the last couple of posts, I've been doing just that.

Today's job was to clear the difficult green foil backed rectangles from the drivers side. I had done around half the side, but these were proving difficult up to the normal yellow vinyl rectangles which pretty much pulled off in one piece, after a bit of heating.



I promised Graeme, (who is following Nina's blog and has his own Ambulance Camper project !), that I would post a video of how I removed the foil backed vinyl, so I did take some video, 2 to be precise, one normal video that ended up around 7 minutes long, but does impress the work that goes in to removing just one vinyl rectangle and its glue. The second one I made with all you people that get bored easily in mind lol, its a Timelapse video that is around a minute long, so a bit easier for you to bear :P. If anyone would like to see the 'long' version then let me know :D.

Just to let you know, the 'tools' needed for this job, or the tools I used in this video, are some Swarfega Brake & Clutch Cleaner (in the squirty bottle), a plastic scraper (something like you would get with a tub of body filler, mine came from a friend at a sign writers, used to apply vinyl graphics normally), a cheap Tesco micro fibre cloth, found near the dusters etc, and a hot air gun, the kind you would use to strip paint, a hairdrier will probably do the job too, but would take longer to heat the vinyl. I heat the vinyl until it bubbles, but you could probably get away with stopping just short of that. Be warned, when you heat the vinyl, you are also heating the metal body panel, if you go too far with it, the metal will start to become pliable, and will be easy to push in and create a dent, if allowed to cool in that position, the body panel may be left with a permanent dent, so if it does pop in, tap the metal around it until it pops back out. It happened to me twice !













I still have lots of glue left to get off on the passenger side and the back doors, and on the front of the roof, but hoping its not the horrible glue that was under the green stuff !

Decal wise, all thats left is this ....


Which shouldn't take too long, then once all that is done, Nina will need an all over T-Cut to try and match the weathered body with the shiny surface that was revealed once the vinyl was removed.

Hoping to get some more things done this weekend, so come back soon ! :).

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Location:Gloucester