Roof Repair: Part 1

After getting the camper home, I spent some time researching what my the best course of action in repairing and replacing the cracked ABS roof.  At first, I thought I might take a similar route that I used for fiberglass repair on my sailboat.  After a bit of Googling, I found a product called "Liquid Roof".

A bit of reading on their website helped me determine that I would need a little more than a gallon of this stuff to try and resurface the roof on the camper.  I found a pretty good deal on a couple gallons on Amazon, and since I am a Prime Member I went ahead and ordered two gallons.

A couple days later after receiving the Liquid Roof can shipment, it was time to get started.

I began by raising the camper and removing the mounting bolts for the roof-top Air Conditioning unit.  This was actually a straight forward process, and honestly the easiest chore of the day.

Once the A/C mounting bolts were removed, I lowered the camper roof and a couple of us lifted the unit right off the roof.  We were very careful to try and preserve as much of the gasket as possible.  We would most likely need to measure and cut a new one later.

With the A/C unit off the top of the camper, we began using a paint scraper to strip off the old weathered ABS roofing.  Most of it came off with ease, as water had penetrated through the cracks and had worn away the glue underneath.

The difficult part came when we got to the very rear of the camper top.  The old roof was still very much adhered to the fiberglass and foam shell underneath.  It tooke three people, some scrapers, and a can of acetone, but finally we had managed to scrape away the entire coating, leaving nothing but the bare foam core underneath.

The only other tricky part was removing the lid latches from the roof as we scraped off the old ABS shell.  There are still pieces of the ABS backing on the latches, which I will have to acetone and scape off for replacement after I done recoating the roof.

Again, more to come...