Neverending Painting

We've been working on painting since getting the RV back to the farm several weeks ago.  I was waiting to post until we were finished...but that's looking to be a while so I figured I'd go ahead and post some interim progress.

When we purchased the RV, several of the black-painted areas had severely degraded clear coat.  Back in the fall when Aaron was doing our original repairs, we had hoped to address all of these areas, but after the mechanical/structural fixes were complete, it was simply too cold and too windy to do much and we ran out of time before our plans to head south.  The one spot he was able to fix was the top cap above the windshield.

Front of the RV before painting

'Top cap' before painting

'Top cap' after painting last fall

This helped a bit - it was the most impactful to our appearance and the area in greatest need of UV protection - but almost a year later the paint was showing wear again, and we decided that black was NOT the way to go - it just attracted too much sun and heat.  So we repainted it a silvery gray to match the lighter colors on the rest of the RV.

Nice and light!

Next we focused on the other damaged clear coat around the sides of the RV.  I don't have pictures of all of it, but here are some examples.

This area is was on our bedroom slide.

One of the basement doors - many looked like this

Aaron sanded away the bad clear coat and repainted with a layer of black and new clear coat.  We're using a combination of Rustoleum American Accents 2X Clear Gloss and Rustoleum Gloss Clear Enamel.  We use the first for UV protection and theoretically the second will provide a hard coat to resist kicked up rocks and whatnot (we have a LOT of chips in the paint).

After painting these look a lot better!

Basement door after painting

Then we started getting ambitious...and our painting started to be neverending.  One of the basement doors appeared to be a replacement, and when they repainted it they painted black and dark gray but neglected to paint the silver stripe that was in between the black and gray everywhere else.  So we figured we could fix that!

Taped off - pre stripe - note how there is a stripe on 
both sides of this panel, so it looks very strange

Stripe complete!

While working on touch-ups for chips on this same door, we discovered that we could get a remarkable color match with DupliColor Ford Magnetic Metallic - conveniently the same color our car uses, which is why we chose it over the other dark grays at O'Reilly's.  The match is uncanny given that there really shouldn't be any match at all.  With the remarkable match, we decided to move beyond just little pen touch ups and get a spray can (or 3...) to repaint entire areas - several replaced basement doors and our back bumper.  Unfortunately we wasted our money earlier on what was supposed to be a perfect color match for our specific color ("Nimbus Gray Metallic/CV43597R") from a specialty company - very expensive paint for an only so-so match. 

Our 'perfect' color match from earlier in the season
- those light areas aren't reflected sunlight, they're 
actually the poorly matched lighter color paint

 

An actual near-perfect color match!

We re-clear coated most of the black paint on the RV - this involved just light sanding to prepare the surface for a new coat as opposed to the heavy sanding where it had completely peeled off.  HOWEVER, we encountered one area next to the front door where the old clear coat we had taped plastic to just kept peeling off.  After this happened twice (once on our original light painting and then again when I cleared a larger area), Aaron had a brilliant idea to go over the surface with extra-sticky duct tape (T-REX) to remove loose clear coat and just keep on clearing it out until it stopped coming off with the tape.

Using duct tape to peel off loose clear coat

That significantly increased the area we had to repaint, but in the final painting nothing came off when we removed the painter's tape, so hopefully it was worth it!

The final area (roughed up) after duct
taping as far as paint still peeled.  The 
original area we thought we needed
to correct was only a couple inches
in diameter.

Looking much better as Aaron 
applies the new clear coat!

The last thing to share is the fiberglass work Aaron did on the rear of the RV.  A basement door and the back bumper had some serious dents/gouges and Aaron applied fiberglass to rebuild the surfaces.

Pre-fiberglass

Post-fiberglass

Sanded and repainted

While we were doing this on the back bumper, the panel that hides the engine popped off its glue holding it to its bracket.  So that sparked another repair where we decided to just replace the glue with bolts.  We originally decided this because the bracket had holes and there were old holes in the fiberglass and we assumed they would line up...nope!  No idea what those holes were for.

You'd think those 5 holes would correspond to the
holes on the bracket behind them...right?  Nope!

So in the end, Aaron drilled new holes, fiberglassed over the old holes, and sanded and painted the whole shebang.

Drilling new holes

Hastening the fiberglass curing

You can see the final surface in the 'matching paint' picture of the back bumper earlier.  It looks great!

With all this work, we're STILL not done with the surface of the RV.  Aaron is unhappy with the painting he did on the front bumper in the fall - it is chipping too easily - so he is planning to redo that and redo the paint on the roof.  Once all that is done, we will have to go back and polish all the freshly painted surfaces...that will be a BIG job!  Hopefully once we're done though the RV will look significantly better!