Time to get buffed
This summer I was able to do some maintenance on the Airstream while off the road. I tried my hand at polishing the aluminum shell to a mirror like finish. I used two tools, a makita variable speed angle grinder with a polishing pad and a Cyclo dual head random orbit polisher. It was quite the adventure! I started out tackling the project full on and quickly realized that no matter how "in shape" I am feeling this job was gonna kick my butt. After a few hours of very repetitive motion with the machines and polish my shoulders were already feeling the burn! Think Daniel San from Karate Kid but with power tools! I switched it up to hitting the trailer early in the am for a few hours and then in the evening until the sun went down. I went through all the advise I have received over the past few years and got down and dirty to bring the bubble to a fine shine! Overall the trailer looks alot better than it did before, however lot's of valuable knowledge was gained through the process and it will be perfected in the coming polishing sessions! Compunding proved to be the critical step.
Once you start removing the swirl marks you can start to see the areas that you didn't go deep enough into with the compounding step. Once you are at this point however, it is very difficult to back track as you will be undoing the many hours you just spent removing swirlmarks, and your arms feel like they are going to fall off, yikes! Not an easy task and altough the trailer is only 23 feet long it begins to look like 123 feet long once you start sectioning it off into 2 foot by 2 foot squares (which is your workable space at any one given point in time)knowing you will need to pass the buffers over these spaces repeatedly no less than 3 times each, ususally more like 5 or 6 times! All this said the trailer looks amazing when it is buffed out and it was a great project but glad to be done and have the rig back on the road! The Cyclo tool is amazing at romoving the swirls and I highly reccomend using ti with the Nuvite polish. I compounded and cyclo'd with F7 and then used the S grade to finish. Good luck to anyone out there looking to polish your trailer and in the end it is soooo worth it.
Once you start removing the swirl marks you can start to see the areas that you didn't go deep enough into with the compounding step. Once you are at this point however, it is very difficult to back track as you will be undoing the many hours you just spent removing swirlmarks, and your arms feel like they are going to fall off, yikes! Not an easy task and altough the trailer is only 23 feet long it begins to look like 123 feet long once you start sectioning it off into 2 foot by 2 foot squares (which is your workable space at any one given point in time)knowing you will need to pass the buffers over these spaces repeatedly no less than 3 times each, ususally more like 5 or 6 times! All this said the trailer looks amazing when it is buffed out and it was a great project but glad to be done and have the rig back on the road! The Cyclo tool is amazing at romoving the swirls and I highly reccomend using ti with the Nuvite polish. I compounded and cyclo'd with F7 and then used the S grade to finish. Good luck to anyone out there looking to polish your trailer and in the end it is soooo worth it.In this picture I am coming out of the fourth turn and headed towards the finish line on the port side of the trailer, yayyy!
posted by Kurtis Tumbleweed at 5:24 PM
1 Comments:
Gol' Dernit Krusty, that baby's a shinin'! I bet you get way better mileage with the bubble all slicked out like that. Could you come back to CO and shine the man-cave. It's galvanized steel, so bring your BIG angle grinder.
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