After some Internet research, I bought a quart of Citristrip - great smelling, supposedly environmentally friendly paint stripper (though I found out later how caustic that stuff really is when i chemically burned a fingertip or two). I painted it on and after some experimentation removing it, finally settled on a stiff nylon scrub brush. Well, the patin came off and revealed a nice gloss on the underlying FRP (pebble side up). The globs of RTV finally gave way and wiht some pulling and brushing, came off revealing a nice job by the builder where he used little white snap-on nail/bolt covers to waterproof and hide the nails. I was surprised to find that the Citristrip loosened the RTV enough for me to get it off when all the other products did squat. I was so encouraged by this, I ordered a couple of drill bit stiff nylon brushes to do the other 3/4 of the roof with this weekend. The only problem is that the nylong scrub brush gets clogged up fast with the paint that sloughs off. I did resoirt to a medium metal pot/pan brush and that worked great until it, too, clogged up. I'm hopeful that the drill bit brushes will overcome this issue with sheer centrifual force.
The guy who sold it to me thought he was doing a good thing, i guess, but just made a decent looking trailer look like it was slapped together. I have sort of adopted this trailer as my first refurb project but didn't want to mess with it unless i could make that roof look right. And now, it appears I can do that. So, after I do that, I plan to add some woodgrain stripping to the outside edges and lower front/back to dress it up some. If successful,I'll move to the inside and refurb that with some lighting, floor covering, and lightweight wall paneling.
I've got to keep the weight down, so I'm toying with removing the rear of the teardrop and just squaring it off and maybe put a peice of diamond plate in the trailer that would be exposed to carry luggage or whatever. I jsut hope i don't get so far into this that I nevfer get my money back out of it
Greg
