Restoring Old Plastics

[pondtunes]

Okay, so it was warm today and i've been thinking about tearing down the shee and painting the whole thing up, So I figured i'd start with the plastics to see how things were going to come out seeing as we're going camping/riding friday I didnt really have time for a complete tear down.

 

Anyways I removed all my plastics and washed them off with soapy water to start. The tank cover was by far the worst piece so I figured I would start with it. Here's what it looked like to start with. Very faded and chalky and nasty and all around horrible looking. (i scraped the stickers too as they were in sad shape)

 

 

 

 

I started with some steel wool just figuring id get some of the crap off of it and scuff it up good before I went on and painted. As i started sanding the plastic started looking better and better as the old faded chalky shit came off of it quite easier than I expected.

 

 

You can see here the red coming back, although scuffed quite a bit I kept on using a little lighter pressure as it got cleaner. I figured that it was looking MUCH better than before and I might try wet-sanding it after the steel wool to see if it would come back to life.

 

I was impressed by how much better the plastic looked just after hitting it with the steel wool, so I got out some ultra fine wetsanding paper and kept the water on it as I sanded it over a couple times.

The result was night and day compared to what it was, the more i wet sanded the slicker and nicer the plastic became.

 

 

 

So I moved on to the rear plastics, heres what they looked like before. You can see they're in pretty sad shape too, the black spots and grime thats been on them FOREVER.

 

 

Again I started with the steel wool, hoping id have as good of a result as I did with the tank plastics, after a while of scrubbing with steel wool and washing the steel wool out over and over this is what it was looking like.

 

 

Things were starting to look just as promising so I continued with the same process, steel wool until all the grime and dead plastic was gone, then wetsanding with the hose until the plastic was nice and slick again. I put the front plastics beside the rears just as a comparison. The difference was amazing.

 

 

And heres a closeup of the front/rear plastics side by side so you can really see the difference.

 

 

I continued my steel wool/wetsanding ritual on the front plastics & the headlight plastic, although I feel I need to hit them with the steel wool again as I got much more off the rears once it was all said and done.. I blame it on being tired by the time I got to the fronts man this was a very long process that required lots of elbow grease. Once I used the steel wool and wetsanded each part individually I reassembled everything and washed it again, then wetsanded it with the hose running just to keep slicking it up. Heres the end result.

 

 

I've pretty much decided that they came out looking soo much better im not going to paint these plastics. I figured they were beyond repair but I was very wrong

[ECshee]

looks really good man, dont paint them. little elbow grease goes a long way

[Boston]

wow man that looks just like brand new plastics!!! congrats!

[MatHolland]

wow, those really turned out great! I will have to remember your steel wool and wet sand trick!

[tundish2800]

If you spray some wd 40 on them nothing will stick to them. That way you don't have to clean as much