We have begun to renovate the 31ft Airstream and are trying to finish, trim and prepare the 23ft Airstream for sale. Juggling both projects and running our business has been a huge challenge. It often feels like any progress we make is in such small increments, that we are not moving forward at all. Here are some pictures of where things stand.
23 ft starts getting polished
Polishing has been a stress filled process. First, the clear coat needs to be removed. We decided that Citristrip was the way to go since it was milder then some of the alternatives. People all over the internet had touted their success peeling the vinyl interiors and clear coated exteriors of their Airstreams with this product.
Not us. We tried using it thin, then thick, leaving it on overnight, pressure washing it off and our results were lack luster at best. It tinted the clear coat and caused the Airstream skin to get fogged up but it was not removed.
Another shot
After doing the entire stripping process twice, we were left with a streaked mess. It wasn’t really working like we had hoped. Below you can see where we put a buffer on what looked to be fairly bare metal and the oxidization mud from the compounding really allows the clear coat streaks to show.
Enter Aircraft Stripper
This is a powerful stripping chemical that eats through gloves and burns skin. Other Airstreamers have used this with success but we again found ourselves with partially cleaned metal. It was only marginally better then the citrus brand and really bad for us generally. We were frustrated and decided we needed a break.
After about 8 weeks of doing nothing to the exterior of the 23 ft and working on making the 31 ft livable (next post), my wife bought a super heavy compounding liquid made by 3M, a cheap buffer and a twisted wool pad and began to wrestle with the polishing. She has been scrubbing off the significant clear coat streaking with the 3M compound.
It is exhausting and filthy work. Having to work through the original plasticoat has made progress really, really slow. Typically, she tackles a small area per buffing session but the results are impressive.
This picture above shows the results of about about 6 buffing sessions of 4-5 hours each and some very sore arms. The amount of pressure that she has to put on the buffer to strip off the clear is significant. We are not sure at this point which would be worse… another round with stripper or gutting out the polishing and using extra compound and hours.
Here is another shot with more polishing completed. The swirl marks are clearly visible and a dual cyclo-buff out will be needed with a fine compound to remove them.
Original Airstream tanks are aluminum and can be polished to a high shine. These two actually came off of the large Airstream but are going to be polished and sold with the 23 foot Airstream. As more valuable of the two coaches, it makes sense to make it as nice as possible before selling.
At this point, the area above the hitch has had the clear coat almost completely rubbed off. The panels down one side are cleared and buffed to the start of the end cap panels. It has been grueling, filthy and a really frustrating experience in general.
We hope to afford a pound of each of the Nuvite II compounds in F7, C and S. They are expensive and we don’t want to waste them on the clear coat removal. It will take 200 hours of polishing after the clear coat is done. Does it add enough value to do all of the Nuvite II compound courses?
Up next: The 31 ft renovation begins.
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