I have a set of boot stripes due to arrive any day now (I'll take pics of me installing them for you guys, never fear), but I wonder about removing the Cooper S badge from the boot...

I hear that the pros use a heat gun to soften the glue, then use dental floss to trim the letters off, but will a hair dryer be hot enough to do the trick? Also, what do people recommend to get off the residual sticky tape residue? I hear WD40 is safe for paint and dissolves glue- anyone used this?

Thanks in advance!

 

Heat gun might actually be too hot. Hair dryer is fine. I have used 3M Adhesive Cleaner to remove residue. I've heard that Goof Off or similar products working as well. Sorry, no input on the WD40.

 

Yeah, I was wondering of a heat gun would actually get things too toasty, but that's what I heard other people recommend...

But I'm not going to buy something when the wife has like half a dozen hair dryers laying around...

 

I just used dental floss, and then got the extra glue off with a fingertip. Clean and wax, and you're done!

Matt

 

Be real careful with a heat gun, you can blister paint with one if you're not careful. If you need heat a hairdryer will give you enough, but unless your ambient temp is pretty cold, all you really need is some monofilament fishing line and some WD-40.

 

Awesome... I think I actually have some monofiliment lying around, and the wife uses some kind of superstrong floss (I think it's made of adamantium or something).

Hopefully my stripes will arrive today!

 

I used a plastic wedge in the Sun on a 93 degree day and it popped off quite well. So it doesn't need to be that hot. A word of caution is there are 2 half-inch long pegs on the back of the emblem, make sure you pull it off straight out or they will snap off. The guy putting on my stripes learned it that the hard way . He then decided to not remove the front emblem, but rather cut around it . He is redoing the front stripe... I removed the emblem for him.
But I acutally bought replacement emblems for the front and back because when I picked up the one I had to replace I liked the adhesive the OEM part used than trying to use silicon to reattach the emblem.

Broken Emblem:


OEM Emblem has a solid black adhesive:



Don't resort to this :

 

Actually, what I'm taking off is the "Cooper S" letters off the boot, and I think those are just held on with 2-sided tape. Good to know about the front emblem, though.

Did your hood stripes ever get any better?

 

We used a hair dryer on high and dental floss. I ran the hair dryer while my husband worked with the floss on each letter. It left some of the sticky stuff behind, so we used Goo Gone to take that off. That seemed to work really well. The badge came off easy, but it took a while to get the sticky stuff off. Good luck! Hope your stripes come today! Can't wait to see them Saturday!

 

It's a "work in progress". He replaced the center stripe and the material streched while he was heating it up. So there is a faint line in the stripe where you can see the body color. The installer was out when I picked up the car. It was so bad that when I went to the British Car Show this weekend I parked in General Parking...in the back.
The installer called this morning and asked how I thought it looked. I nearly choked on my coffee. He said it was the materials fault, I said it didn't look like that on the first stripe and if he knew it looked like that why would he leave it. I have an appointment on Thursday to get it fixed. Fingers Crossed.

 

On a hot summer day, you probably don't need the heat gun. Just cut it off with floss and then remove residue with goo gone or similar product.

 

If you plan on reapplying the CooperS then I'd suggest putting masking tape or that blue painters tape on the letters before you remove them. Pull the tape tight and then press down real hard to make sure you've got 1 strip of tape across all the letters. Carefully remove the lettering with dental tape or fishing line. We used fishing line to remove them and then Goo Gone to get rid of the rest of the residue. You may have to reposition a letter or two, but it makes it pretty easy to get them back on straight. We used Goo Gone and a Q-Tip to get the remaining residue off the back of the letters and then cut 3M 2 sided tape (Autozone) to reapply the lettering. I wouldn't worry about making sure you've got 100% of the letters covered with tape. I probably got about 80% and it's holding fine.

After I was done I had another thought. Once the lettering was removed and on the tape strip it would be pretty easy to take a piece of paper and do a pencil rubbing on the lettering to create patterns for the 2 sided tape. You'd just want to make sure you cut the tape smaller than the letter a bit. It seems like that would be much easier that cutting small strips and trying to fit them to the letters like I did.

Pics of the CooperS relocated to the dash in My Gallery.

 

Actually, the boot stripes from Aesthetic Creations are sent with a replacement badge, or so I'm told. I haven't seen it yet, but I hoped that they would come with adhesive pre cut (may be wrong on that). But it's great to know how to replace the existing badge, should I want to attempt that- thanks for the tip about laying tape across the letters first- I was wondering how to properly re-align them.

Good luck with your stripes, Flickster!

 

I just left them on...


too bad I sold this car.

 

My stripes that arrived 2 days ago definately don't have any "replacement badge"..... sounds like an expensive type of deal for Aesthetic Creations to throw in the deal.
I hope you get them though.....

Good Luck
I'll be installing my viper stripes tomorrow. I'll shoot a few pics when the job's done.

Donald

 

nice.