December 15-16th, 2020 - Christmas Lights and Another RV Project

Tuesday I began working on removing the burgundy decals on Marge because they are faded and cracked. They make the rig look old. In just two hours I removed all of the decals on the driver side. I heated them up a little and peeled back a corner. Once I got my fingers on the corner they decals pulled off in various pieces with little effort. I was pumped. This was proving much easier than removing the gold decals a few years back. I then removed all the glue residue with a product I bought online that is awesome.  Here is a picture of the driver side with arrows pointing to where the burgundy decals were that I removed.

Last night we drove to a subdivision about seven miles away that puts on a massive Christmas light show. Virtually every house in the subdivision is lit up with thousands of lights. They started doing this 28 years ago to honor a good neighbor who needed hospice care. There is no charge to drive through, they just ask for a donation to the hospice. In that 28 year period of time they have raised over $970,000. I'm sure this year will put them over a million. What a tribute to a friend. It is quite a display and took 45 minutes to wind through the subdivision. So much to see. Here are a couple of pictures while on the move.

Each house was different and better than the next. A fun evening.

Yesterday I decided to tackle taking the burgundy decals off the passenger side of Marge. This side looked worse than the driver's side because it faces the sun at home all the time. Here are two before pictures.

You can only appreciate how bad the decals look with a couple of close up pictures. Here are two.

Removing the decals leaves a "shadow" because the gelcoat underneath is bright and shiny like new while the surrounding area is dulled and a little yellowed from fourteen years of weather. The "shadow" left behind is much less offensive to me than the old decals.

Upon starting the passenger side I quickly found that these decals were not going to peel off like they did on the other side. I did a section of about two feel in length with the heat gun and plastic scraper. It took well over two hours because the decal only came off an eighth inch at a time. A horribly slow process and painful on my feet up on the ladder. There had to be a better way.

I had brought along a decal eraser which is a round rubber wheel that chucks into a drill. It is used by autobody men to take decals, pinstriping, etc. off. I had it a long time but never used it because I was afraid the spinning might burn the gelcoat surface under the decal. It is not as tough and hard as automotive paint. After two hours with the heat gun and scraper I decided to give the rubber wheel a try. It worked fantastically but was a little slow. because the wheel is only a half inch wide and these decals are over a foot wide in some places and up to ten feet long. An added benefit of the wheel though was that when I was finished with the wheel there was very little glue residue remaining to be removed with solvent. 

Just as I finished it started raining. Here is a picture of the final result. The first picture has arrows pointing to the "shadow" from where I took off the gold decals a few years ago. 

The next picture has arrows pointing to the the "shadow" for the areas of the burgundy decals I removed yesterday. It stretched from the end of the slide out to the back cap. 

I am glad this project is completed. It's been bugging me for a while but it was not something to do in the hot sun in Missouri if I could avoid it. Nothing makes an RV look dated more than old. faded, cracked decals. The only decals left on Marge are the black decals on the bottom and the "Carriage" logo on each side. They are in good shape so I will leave them alone for now.

As I said above, just as I finished working the rain started. It rained all afternoon and into the evening. At one point Kelly's phone alerted. She was on a Zoom call and ignored it thinking it was a "silver alert", i.e. an old fart missing. As it turned out it was a tornado warning and one touched down and did some damage in an industrial area about two miles from us. From now on we are going to pay more attention to such warnings. The park does have a large block building we can go in an emergency and a large block clubhouse.  Let's hope we never have to go there. We have a Midland weather alert scanner but for whatever reason it won't work. Figures.