De greased, Nu-finish

Last night when I got home I got started on doing some prep work for the eventual sale of my 99 Tacoma.  I grabbed my socket set and checked the torque on my valve cover bolts.  It seemed like there was some minor seepage of oil going on.  I found a couple that felt loose.  I then grabbed my bottle of degreaser and went to town under the hood. The engine compartment had not been cleaned in many, many years.  In addition to spraying down the area I hit what I could with a stiff brush as well. I also got down on the wet driveway and sprayed the bottom of the engine and transmission to remove years of oil/grease build up.  I thoroughly soaked the engine so I made sure to fire it up and let it run for awhile to dry it out thoroughly.  Things under the hood looked much better when I was done.

I also tried working on a small section of the gross, poor quality clear coat on the passenger side.  The stuff that has not peeled off has become very dark and dirty looking, not a good thing when your truck is white.  At first I tried rubbing the dirty clear coat with a magic eraser, hoping it would help brighten it up.  It had little to no effect.

I then grabbed a small section of sand paper and lightly sanded the shitty clear coat.  I sprayed it with the hose as I worked, my version of wet sanding I guess.  The sand paper did seem to do the trick, the problem is it makes the area look scratched which I may be able to address with finer grit paper.  The experimental section I worked on was about the size of a dollar.  I will do some more experimentation this week.

I also pulled out my trusty bottle of Nu Finish.  I became familiar with the product back in the late 80’s and early 90’s.  You may remember their commercials where they would go into a junk yard and polish up the hood of junk cars, turning faded paint to bright and shiny.

I have used the product for a long time.  I remember in the late 80’s my mom gave me her Chevy Citation, sometime after I crashed and wrecked my 69 Buick Special Deluxe that she also bought for me for $600.

The Citation was a decent car and it’s 4 speed manual transmission allowed it to do pretty incredible front wheel drive burnouts if called upon.  It’s biggest visual flaw was it’s yellow paint was fading pretty badly. When it came time to sell it I gave the Chevy a head to toe Nu-Finish polish and it truly did transform the paint.  It looked great and surely helped me get a few more bucks when we sold it.  Ever since then I have been a Nu-Finish believer.

The sun was going down so I just wanted to do a small section of the Tacoma hood to see how it worked.  It was hard to tell just how dramatic the change was in the low light but it definitely looked better.  Sometime this weekend I hope to get a couple hours to go over the entire truck, hoping for similar results as I had with mom’s Citation close to 30 years ago.

Man can you believe Kobe Bryant scored 60 points in the last game of his 20 year career? Wow talk about going out with a bang.  Good for him.