Since we had to begin somewhere we chose to start with cleaning the roof gutters, using several different types of metal, copper and Scotch-Brite disks to remove the paint and rust. Scotch-Brite paint removal disks can be mounted to a drill and are designed to only remove the paint and not to damage the metal. After we removed the sealer and cleaned out the rust the roof gutters appeared to be in pretty good condition. It’s nice when not everything is a letdown. We build a staging around the van so we could remove the paint from the roof without actually standing on it.

Now why didn’t we dissolve the old paint using some kind of corrosive substance; drawback of using acids to dissolve the old paint is that it is very difficult to clean out all the acid remainders in between two body panels and hollow spaces. Eventually the acid will come out by itself, but it might take months before it does. Imagine bubbles appearing underneath the pain of your freshly painted van. Not a very pleasant prognosis...

We used a rust converter to treat all the remaining rusted spots. Repeat the application of rust converter until satisfactory.  To finish the paint removal procedure we applied a thin layer of primer to prevent the naked metal from rusting. Either spray paint the primer or do it simple using a brush; we’ll be sanding it all down again when preparing for the actual paint.

The entire procedure is a time consuming job; even with the two of us the removal of all the paint took us two days of hard labour. So beware :-p