Steering Through Life's Mysteries or the Wheel of Restoration

In keeping with my theme of doing some level of restoration on the interior of the truck, while leaving the exterior kinda of ratty, I removed the steering wheel from the steering column.  This will enable me to do a thorough restoration of the actual steering wheel and give me better access to the dash and the steering column.  I will sand down the rust and crusty primer and then prime and rattle can paint each.  According to many posts on the truck forum that I belong to, the Rustoleum color #7272 is a very close match to the original dash color.  I'll get some of that in the future, when I'm ready to paint the dash.  The steering column appears to have been some color of gray.  I'll do some digging on the forum to see if there is a modern equivalent.  But for now, my attention is on the wheel.

As a reminder, here is how the steering wheel looked while it was in the truck:

Here is how it looked when I got it out and onto the workbench.

Front:

Back:

A couple of things to take away from these shots, other than the messy workbench:

1.  The steering wheel has many cracks in it.
2.  The wrap has worn away in many places.
3.  The wheel has areas with no paint, some original paint, some primer and some other paint drips.
4.  A lot of dirt and grime in the area where the horn button sits.

After getting the wheel onto the bench and taking those before pics, I set about trying to get that green wrap off of the wheel.  It had clearly been there for a very long time!  So long, in fact, that some areas (as noted in #2 above) had actually been worn away.  So you might think that it would be pretty easy to just pick at it and flake it off or peel it off in big pieces.  Well, not so much. Apparently, this was the top of the line steering wheel wrap back in the day.  It had some kind of adhesive on it. Which means that what was left of it was still very much stuck to the wheel and where there wasn't any wrap left, there was glue.  OMG!  Like everything else so far, what should be an easy job becomes a bit of a chore.  Any way, armed with a small pick, I started flaking away the wrap, working my way around the wheel.  It took about 1 1/2 to 2 hours to work my way around.  When I was done, this is what I had:

Can you see the small little flakes?!?  Yes, there are some large curls of wrap, but can you see the small flakes?!?  Also in the top right you can see a can of Goof Off.  It was moderately effective at loosening the glue's hold on the wrap and allowed me to get the pick under an edge without damaging the steering wheel material.  What I was left with, though, was a spiral outline of the wrap.  At first, I thought the wrap had actually molded the steering wheel material.  But when I looked closer, the spiral outline was all the glue that was left on the wheel.

Well, you can't paint over glue, so I got the Goof Off out again and went at it.  First scraping glue with the pick and then wiping with the Goof Off.  It was pretty slow going, so I switched to acetone. The acetone was much more effective than the Goof Off, even though the Goof Off smelled much stronger.  Since the wrap covered all sides of the wheel where it was applied, I have to wipe with the acetone all sides of the wheel.  Unfortunately, even with the acetone, the glue does not come up completely on the first pass.  I spent another couple of hours working the pick and then wiping with the acetone until I needed a fresh air break (yes even with the garage door open, the fumes were pretty bad).

Before I took the break, I did do some mild sanding with a 220 grit sanding block.  Some of the areas of the wheel looked as though there was some kind of a build up on it.  I didn't know what it was, but decided I wasn't going to paint over it, so it had to go.

Here is a before and after shot after picking, scraping, wiping and sanding:

Before:

After:

It's easy to see the spiral glue marks in the before pic, especially if you click on it and enlarge it. The glue marks are lessened and in some cases gone in the after pic.  Clearly, I am not done with this phase of the effort.  But brain preservation dictated a break....

Here is a close up of one of the wheel spokes.  Because the wrap covered this area completely, the original paint was preserved.  It was good to find some of the original paint, as it takes all of the guesswork out of deciding what color to paint the wheel.  Here's the closeup:

This shot really shows it all.  Here you can clearly see the primer (which ran when it was sprayed on...) the original paint, the wheel material, the glue and where I've scraped at it and the remnants of the glue spirals.

Here is a closeup of the worst cracked area.  I'm going to use the epoxy putty to fill this in, once I've gotten it all cleaned out.  Here's the crack closeup:

It looks pretty bad.  Hopefully, the epoxy putty will do the trick.  If not, then I'll have to replace the wheel.  I'm really hopeful that I can fix it and save the wheel.

That's all for now.  That's as far as I've gotten.  I wanted to do this update, as the next phase will take me a while to complete.

Don't forget to vote in the test poll from my last post!  Not many of you have voted...and I know that you're out there.  So get out there people and vote!  Please.