I’ve always wanted to see what lies beneath the green paint on this bus. Today, we started stripping down the back hatch – the goal is to see if we can get it back to original paint.
The top layer of green falls right off with a little scrapping from a razor blade.
The underlying primer is much more difficult – we tried a bunch of different combinations of scrapping, scrubbing with acetone and paint remover, and a little elbow grease. Turns out what worked best for us is a healthy paper towel rubbing of Motsenbocker’s Graffiti Remover on the primer, then another healthy rubbing on the dark brown respray paint with no-scratch dobie pads. After lots and lots of scrubbing, the original paint starts to shine through. Yay!
Unfortunately, it takes hours to get even a small spot visible – and, as we uncovered more of the back hatch, it became clear that the original paint had been heavily sanded when the bus was repainted that hideous dark brown at some point in its history. This means we won’t be able to just strip the bus down to OG paint – oh well, we will re-paint it back to that color anyways.
