Hi Bruce.
I think my first step will be to tread very carefully and sweat a lot!
The decals are factory original, first series ones that I am hoping to preserve, so I will be polishing very carefully around them all. Before I can start any of that work, however, I have to find all the parts of the original paint that are showing signs of having lifted free of the panel metal due to oxidation of the surface plating. Most of those I should be able to stabilize by carefully wicking 'Crazy Glue' under the paint via capillary action. A few bits of paint have actually cracked and curled up, away from the panel along the crack line. Those are going to be a bit more challenging. My thought is to carefully heat them with a heat gun to soften the paint and then press it back flush with the panel surface again and let it cool. that should bring it back flat enough to wick the glue under it and not simply have the brittle lifted paint break free.
Still a bit of thinking to do about those steps, but that is the general, arm waving plan at the moment.
There are a few decals where the black paint has been chipped away. Hard to spot them all unless you look under black light. I found some similar issues with the two receivers and tracked down a semi-gloss black paint that is a very good match to the black used on the decals. I will use that under black light again to touch up the chips on the decals.
There is one decal that now has a large blob of black crud covering one of the letters almost completely. Sadly, I dare not risk doing anything about it. The clear backing on those decals was very thin to start with and is now 75 years old. They simply cannot handle any kind of pressure applied to them that cleaning would require.
David
|