Let's start by getting rid of the rust and making her shine!
To get her back to the way she looked leaving the factory we need address the rust on the inside under the floor, take care of some rust on the outside (back door hinges, behind the sliding rail from de cargo door, rims and some other small spots), polish the paintwork and blacken the trim.
Rust inside:
As long as there is nothing installed you can still get to everything without having to break down stuff. So let’s take out the walls and subfloor and start with a blank canvas.
Taking out the subfloor seemed easy enough. Just unscrew some bolds and out she goes…. until… one of the bolds snaps right off. Okay… so just drill it out and make some new thread, try a new bold and let’s move on.
The white floor looks not to bad at all. Only a few spots of rust. I grind the rusty spots back to the bare metal and use rust preventing primer as a first layer. After that I use white hammerite paint to cover and seal it.
And there it is, the white canvas!
Rust outside:
There was a very small (2mm) red spot just above the sliding door rail. Because I could unbolt it from the inside I decided to have a look if I could fix this spot real fast.
Well….. you know that the biggest part of the iceberg is under water…. same goes for a 2mm spot of rust just above a rail from a sliding door.
That little spot was all we saw.
This girl makes nothing go fast! I sanded every spot of rust and surrounding areas back to bare metal, primed it and used the original color paint to spray paint it again. On all the surface areas that came in direct contact with the rail I applied some white sealant. I also used some sealant around the bolds before screwing the rails back to the van.
Looks like new again.
The hinges on the backdoors had a little rust on them also. So when I was working on the rails I took care of the hinges at the same time.
Nice and white again!
Last bit of rust (as far as I know now…) were the rims. For now we want the van to look as close to original as possible so they had to be repainted also.
Took a lot of strength to get them off and I even had to buy a bigger tool to unbolt them but I won!
Next step was cleaning, priming with wheel primer and painting with wheel paint in the original silver color.
Light grey trim?:
The trim on the side had turned to light grey and was a lot lighter than the bumpers on the van. I still had some special “bumper black” from the time I owned a Land Rover Discovery. The wheel arch trims on that car also turned grey when she came to age.
Working with this stuff is super simple. Just degrease the plastic using something like ammonia and roll it on. It dries very vast and tadaaaa…
Just don’t get it on white paint!
Paint restoration:
Don’t really know what they have done with the van but it seemed like the van was faded all over the place and on some areas not at all. I had some commandant4 cleaner left over but that wasn’t enough to take care of the job and it's not unavailable here in Sweden. And I wasn’t happy with the result. So I bought a new pad for the eccentric grinder, a new bottle of polish and got on with it. Sealed everything with Turtle Wax (I love this stuff!).
Now I like the result. She looks like new!
