Repairs Complete-ish...

 Well, for better or worse our repairs are 'complete.'   Meaning...we ran out of time.  When we came back from our brief camping excursion in West Virginia, we decided despite what may or may not be closed due to COVID-19, we needed to get back on the road, and we started making reservations for a departure on October 16.

In keeping with our previous post, the neverending painting continued neverending.  And, realistically, in the end there are still a few more spots we would repaint if we had the time...but you have to draw the line somewhere!

So, after the previous post, we continued repainting various panels on the RV.  After reapplying clear coat, we had to wait for it to cure, sand it down, and polish it.

We even dragged my mom to Princeton for a
weekend to help sand!

Polishing with the polisher from 
Walmart - we do NOT recommend 
this method

MUCH better polishing with the 
attachment for the angle grinder - use
with care!!

Our initial polishing sessions were quite a disappointment.  We bought a $30 polisher from Walmart that did basically nothing.  It gave a rough matte finish, but nothing like the gloss we expected with videos we'd viewed online.  We finally went to Harbor Freight and bought an attachment for my dad's angle grinder and that made ALL the difference.  We paired this relatively cheap investment with some 7" wool pads and Meguiar's Ultimate Compound and voila! - GLOSS!  Still nothing like what the professionals have, but perfectly good for us amateurs.

Half new polish with angle grinder and half old
polish with Walmart polisher - see the difference!

A note of caution if you decide to follow the same route - the angle grinder is STRONG.  If you get it stuck, it WILL burn through the clear coat.  We had to re-clear coat a couple of areas as we learned how to use it.

Our second biggest discovery that is quite relevant to share....2K clear coat.  The '2K' stands for 2 component (K = c??).  Aaron likes to talk about this as basically spraying epoxy over the paint.  The 2K clear coat comes in two cans - a paint and a hardener.  You mix the two and then have an hour to hour and a half to spray the clear coat on whatever surface you desire.  This stuff is AMAZING.  Instead of spray cans, Aaron used a paint sprayer for his air compressor from Harbor Freight, and the difference in the thickness, evenness of application, and overall gloss of the resulting clear coat upon initial application was AMAZING.  Seriously.  We regret that we wasted so much time with the spray can stuff from Rustoleum that we bought at Walmart.  Now, of course, this 2K stuff is more expensive, but it works SO much better we feel it is 100% worth the cost.  Most importantly, we were still repainting/reapplying clear coat during our final week of repairs, and this stuff cures in 4-8 hours instead of 7 days!

Applying the clear coat with the air gun

We ended up buying this from what we could determine was the only 2K clear coat retailer in the New River Valley - James T Davis, which seems to have a small unmentioned branch in Christiansburg in addition to a main hub in Lynchburg based on the website and receipt.  He carries ShopLine brand 2K clear coat, which worked great for us.  In the future, if we have more time for delivery, we might try some other brands on Amazon and whatnot, but this local option was great for our immediate needs, and the person working at the shop was able to give us great information on the type of hardener to get and all (it depends on your working temperature).  We did manage to get clear coat on everything before we left the farm, but we didn't get to the waxing, which we'll have to do in Florida!

While this was going on, Aaron had a huge side project he worked on with my dad - upgrading the electric at the farm to fix the voltage problems we had at the new RV parking spot.  First, they ran a new neutral line out to the parking spot, because the old exposed line was leaking electricity to the ground.  Next, they prepared for a new 200A electrical connection at the farm.  AEP had advised us to do this a few weeks ago to help with our voltage problems at the RV parking spot AND to just modernize the electrical supply for the house (and remove a bunch of fire hazards!).  This was a long involved process that I didn't participate in much at all, but it involved relocating the meter so the incoming wire no longer draped over the garage and rerouting the power flow to the garage underground.  Here are some photos!

The subsoiler Dad used to dig a trench
for the new neutral line along with his
fabricated PVC tube to lay the line.

Dad and Aaron preparing to lay the 
new neutral line.

Adding the equipment for the new
meter location.

YET ANOTHER new trench my dad
dug to bury the line from the new meter
to the chicken coop.

After all these upgrades and the new line run from AEP, the 50 amp power supply for the RV is in great shape, and we've removed a bunch of electrical fire hazards from undersized and iffily-joined wires supplying electricity to the house and garage on the farm.  Win-win!

And one last thing...right before we headed out, Aaron cut up one of the old desks he made for our house in Christiansburg AGES ago and made me a new dining table for the RV.  This new rectangular table should be much more functional than the circular one that came with the RV.  Assuming we like it, we'll work on getting a cherry-colored one in the future!

Yay for rectangles!

This should be my last repair post - next up, our new adventures on the road in the times of coronavirus...stay tuned!

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!