Rear Spoiler Work Commencing

I went over to Harbor Fright yesterday and bought a set of saw horses to prop up the spoiler while I scrub it.

Like most things from HF, "Some Assembly Required", but the instructions were complete, and correct, and all hardware reported for duty.

Like most things from HF, it's made as lightweight as possible (they must channel Colin Chapman), and is scary flimsy until ALL the pieces are assembled, squared up, and all the hardware is securely tightened.

So here they are in use.....

This is the side that faces the car, and most of it can't be seen when it's on the car, but it's still filthy from several years of being off the car, mostly outside.


This is one of the parts you could see, if you squatted down and peeked up...

I vacuumed it down with my shop vac and a bench brush to get the Big Chunks off, and took a zillion measurements and pix for the archivists.

The reason for pulling this years ago was to clean all the stuff that had collected in the open areas between the spoiler and the car. If you look on the glass, you can see a 'ghost image' made of baked-in dirt of where the spoiler was covering the glass. That stuff is darned near impossible to get off, and I finally resorted to 600 grit Wet-or-Dry, and a flood of water, to get most of it off the glass.

 I have special polishes and pads, but I've never buffed/polished glass before, so I'm a little hesitant to go at it without at least watching a few YouTube videos.

And the inside of the glass has areas of residue from when it had a tinted film applied. The film is still on the side rear quarter windows, but has been sun damaged to where it's no longer dark grey/black, but a bluish-purple tint. I'll pull it off when I go gonzo on the interior. I really like a dark tint on those three windows, so that's something else I have to shop. Maybe the tint shops here can give me some tips on getting the stuff off. "Automotive Goo Gone" does nothing, so I'm sure most of the other cleaners like Simple Green won't budget it, either. Previous experience indicates some kind of solvent mixed with an appropriate amount of Elbow Grease will be required.

Look at that CRUD!

 
This stuff was baked on so hard I had to soak it with a mix of dish soap and Windex for several days before it popped loose. The corner of the rubber gasket is caked with similar dirt. It took a couple of days of soaking and scrubbing to get the window gasket clean. It looks pretty good now, but 'black stuff' keeps coming off when I clean the glass and hatch area, so I'll have to scrub a coat or three of Back-To-Black into it to seal it up.

 
More of the same on the passenger side. You can see one end of the wiper assembly poking in to the picture. Having both the spoiler and the wiper installed makes it very difficult to get the bottom edge of the glass clean. When the wiper is parked, you can't lift it to clean the glass under it, or change the blade. Since I'll never deliberately take it out in the rain, I'll never use the wiper, so off it came.

  An astounding amount of crap was trapped in there, and every time I washed the car it came flooding out. Even 15 minutes pressure washing *this corner* (pic immediately above) just kept bringing stuff out, so I pulled the spoiler. You can also see the mud caked on the window gasket, and the dust that's baked on to the glass.  One of the main reasons so much got it there was the 'rubber' gasket had degraded so badly that it was buckled and shrunken, allowing water and small debris to enter, but not leave.

So that's what been going on lately in the garage. Still going through stuff in the basement, including clothing to donate to Good Will, and trying to find some of my equipment. My cool little Weller temperature-controlled soldering station is AWOL. I'll probably get another one to keep on the garage workbench, because sometimes you need to solder stuff.