Success! We have our first coat of primer on the
boler.
The first step was to remove the rubber stone guard and scrape the adhesive.
In order to do so, we pulled the old rubber guard off quite easily and then soaked the contact cement with mineral spirits for a few hours to loosen the goo. After some serious scraping followed by sanding, all the adhesive was gone.
Next step was to fill all the little dings and holes. I sand down to the bare
fiberglass, wipe with acetone and then slap on some bondo. After about 10 minutes of drying I sand till smooth. I tried using duplicolour high build primer over the body filler for the tiniest nicks and I don't recommended it. It is a lacquer based primer and polyurethane
paint will not adhere to it as well as if you were to just use polyester body filler. That and the cleaning solvent I chose peels it right off. At this point I also fastened in the rivets for the closet support bar and the curtain rod hooks for the acrylic
windows as we will just
paint over these rivets.
After that, clean! I made a mixture of tsp and water and scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed! Followed by a rinse wipe.
Then, sanding. This step is tedious and is much easier done with a friend. We armed ourselves with random orbit sanders and a stack of 120grit paper as well as a oscillating tool and rotary tool for harder to reach places. We could see the faded yellow, ghostly colour behind the original white top coat and sanded the whole trailer and the door down to this level. This was roughly a 6 hour job, taking lots of breaks.. Take lots of breaks.
After that, it's the acid wash. We used
fiberglass solvent from Interlux to remove any remaining waxy residues and other contaminents.
Lastly, prime. The undercoat. With 2 of us working we shared a tack cloth as we went through it and started at the Mohawk, finished the roof and then she tackled below the belly band while I tackled above. We used 6" high density foam rollers and just under a quart of Interlux pre kote to do a single coat on the trailer. We did not roll and tip as this is not the top coat and we will be sanding it with 220grit before proceeding to rolling and tipping our vessel.