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Remove/Replace Cladding HELP!

B

brengelj

GUEST
I need to remove the driver side rear quarter cladding behind the wheel well. Someone backed into me and left a minor dent in the plastic, that looks like I could pop out if I could take the piece of cladding off and work with it. :8: The dent is really minor, but I can see it. It is driving me nuts.

Does anyone have any tips on removing and replacing the cladding? Any tips on removing light scratches? Thanks for the help.

Jon
 
I don't know about dents, but a heat gun used carefully can dramatically reduce or eliminate scratches in bed covers and should work equally on cladding. When I bought my 02 Av, it was a dealers demo with a few K miles on it. Bed cover #3 had three spots about 4-5" in diameter where the dealer had tried to clean of "tree sap stains" with an abrasive. (Yes, I leveraged an additional $$ discount). Useing 303 protectant helped a little to mask the scratches, but when the 303 was washed off, it looked pretty nasty. I decided to try a heat gun to "re-flow" the plastic. I used a Master Heat Gun model HG-501A, (used on heat shrink tubeing in electronics applications). This type of heat gun gets VERY HOT (it can melt solder!) so be careful if you try it. I held the heat gun about 2-3" from the panel scratches for about 5-10 seconds, until I saw the plastic "turn wet" then immediately moved the heat gun to an adjacent area. If you keep the heat gun moving, it dosn't take long to cover large areas. Make sure to use good lighting. I made about 3 passes over the scratched areas. When I was done I noticed that the areas I had heated were a slightly different shade (a little more shiny) from the areas I didn't heat. I went ahead and put it back on the AV, thinking that, if the slight difference in shading bothered me, I could try to heat the entire panel evenly later. It has been a month now, and I can't see the shading difference anymore. I guess weather and Sun have evened things out. I also experimented useing the heat gun on those white spots that seem to appear on the bed covers. The heat gun makes them disappear as well. I haven't had a reason to try this on cladding yet, but it worked so well on the bed covers, I wouldn't hesitate to try it on my AV.
 
if you can get your hands on an April '03 issue of Truckin' magazine there is an article in there on how to remove all the cladding on the truck.
 
brengelj said:
I need to remove the driver side rear quarter cladding behind the wheel well. ?Someone backed into me and left a minor dent in the plastic, that looks like I could pop out if I could take the piece of cladding off and work with it. ? :8: The dent is really minor, but I can see it. ?It is driving me nuts.

Does anyone have any tips on removing and replacing the cladding? ?Any tips on removing light scratches? ?Thanks for the help.

Jon

Someone moved my Av next to a boulder and I didn't move it until that night and guess what ? I didn't see the ROCK :8:

No big deal though, I cracked the same piece, the drivers side rear QP behind the tire. I called the dealer and it was somewhere about $60. Took a few days to get. I picked it up and swapped it out. I was surprised at how cheap it was ! :D

The hardest part about the job was clearing all the broken off push clips, but that was easy. I don't think it is very possible to take off the panel without breaking these clips. I recommend just replacing the panel, as it comes with new clips and will look brand new. :D

If not, you should go buy clips first.

 
You'll most definitely need to go by clips regardless. When I "took off" a piece of my cladding, I had the help of a rather large rock on the trail, but I discovered (like others here) that it wasn't terribly expensive to replace. I don't know how much the clips run by themselves, but they can't be too bad.
 
yeah i guess i should have mentioned that. you will definitely need more clips. i will try to get the instructions/pics up from the article i mentioned above.
 
You can wait as long as you want PUNISHER has not logged on since 2012.

If you have a question start a new topic.
 
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