I spent a Sunday afternoon stripping the cracked & flaking paint on the high-top of the T3 Camper.
Firsly I applied generous amounts of bio-paint stripper to the front side of the roof using an old paintbrush. This took around 20 minutes to take effect so whilst I was waiting, I attempted to remove some of the larger pieces of cracked paint from the passenger side of the roof which didn’t have much effect due to it being such old paint!
Once the paint on the front-side was lifting, I used a dual-ended scraper tool (one side a razor, the other a plastic razor) as well as a few plastic stripping tools; the latter proving a little useless! I stuck with the metal razor on the scraper tool and worked my way inwards starting at the edges of the roof. I had an empty paint pot that I used to collect the paint flakes once they were scraped off which definitely saved some time cleaning up.
When I was happy that the worst of it was off, I repeated the process on the passenger side of the roof. This time the bio-stripper worked a lot faster which I believe was down to the sun being on it however it did leave more residue that before which added an extra step to the clean-up. One potential issue I had to watch out for was ensuring the paint stripper didn’t touch any other areas on the van as this has been painted recently so I don’t want to create extra work for myself.
This took much longer than the front as I discovered a previous repair job to the fibreglass on the roof side – whatever they used previously didn’t react with the paint stripper which left a fairly uneven surface however due to not knowing the extent of the original damage, I decided to work around this until I can take a closer look to ensure I don’t reopen what could be a leak repair.
4 razor blades later, I was much happer with the results but at this point I was losing light so had to call it a day. The final thing I had to do was hose it all down to ensure no paint stripper residue was left on the van as well as washing off any paint shavings that I failed to catch in my pot. The rear side of the roof is the last bit that needs stripping before I can sand this down and begin the painting process. Really happy with the results!
