‘68 Vintage Airstream

Saturday marked the first below-95-degrees day in Austin in a few months. I took advantage of the cooler temperature to tackle the weatherstripping on a few curbside windows. I received our order for weatherstripping from VintageTrailerSupply earlier in the week and I was itching to get started. I had read some posts on AirForums about what solvents to use to remove the old weatherstripping residue and found a lot of mixed feedback. I bought some acetone and some denatured alcohol (for cleaning) but I wasn’t convinced those would work. I found out quickly that acetone eats through nitrile gloves so I switched to the chemical resistant ones I had laying around from a previous heavy-duty solvent project. I headed back to AirForums to see what other products to work. I saw mention of lacquer thinner and checked the garage for some. The previous home owner had left some random cleaning products and as I was rummaging through, I came across a bottle of Jasco adhesive remover. Bingo! It was supposedly a paste but it turned out to be more like a jelly. I slathered some of that around the old weatherstripping and waited five minutes. The old stuff shriveled up and started to peel on its own. It didn’t take much with the right product to remove the old adhesive and then brighten up the aluminum. Since this was going to be covered by new weatherstripping, I just used some 0000 steel wool.

While I was in there, I took apart the window crank assembly and gave all the parts a once-over with steel wool as well to remove some of the oxidation and give it some shine. I removed the window catches from the ledge and replaced all of the rusted metal screws with new zinc ones of the same size.  That seemed to be the only rusting component besides the window clips (I’m nervous to replace those as they could easily break the glass during removal). I re-greased the window operator and re-assembled everything.

After cleaning the weatherstripping area with alcohol, I rough-cut the new weatherstripping to length and then cut the miters for the corners. A quick peel of the backing and the windows were sealed up. I shut the window tight to hold the weatherstripping in place while the adhesive set up. On the 29 inch window I found a small gap toward the top of the curve that didn’t sit tight against the weatherstripping. I’m not sure if the glass is warped or the Airstream shell is slightly out of shape. Judging by the rain we got later in the day, it doesn’t look like an issue for now though I’ll keep an eye on it.

All told, I completed two windows and started the weatherstrip removal of a third.  It was clearly slow-going to find the right products clean up all of the components however I now have a working idea of how the windows need to be restored so I’ll tackle a few more this coming weekend.