Tar Pits Part 2

So, two weeks or so of picking away at the tar mats for a few hours has left a big gooey mess in my race car. The bulk of the actual tar is gone, but the residue left by heat gun/scraper combo is pretty thick in places. Speaking of the heat gun...I got really tired of holding the gun in place to heat an area, and then heat another area while I scraped the previous area. Well, I guess I didn't get tired of holding the gun so much as I got tired of burning my friggin hand while I was scraping. So I dug up one of my old "third hand" vises and made up this highly sophisticated heat gun stand:


The method is as follows -
1) Point the gun at some tar
2) Wait till it gets a bit shiny & goopy
3) Point the gun at an adjacent bit of tar
4) Scrape previous goopy tar. (don't burn your hand, stupid!)
6) Repeat steps 2 - 4
6a) Explain to your wife why exactly you're meticulously scraping tar off the floor of junk car.

Here's what it looks like right after I finish scraping.




It's not terrible, but it's just a lot of work with a solvent to get it up. To knock it down as much as possible, and to cut down on the amount of nasty chemicals, I put a wire wheel on my trusty old drill and went to work on the dried up tar. This took several more evenings, but the results were worth it:

All that's left now is use a lot of nasty solvent to remove the remaining nasty tar. Knowing this day was coming, I picked up a small can off the aforementioned nasty solvent (GooGone). I put some on a rag and went to work. The results were less than impressive. The solvent softened up the tar, but it packed up on the rag so quickly that it was useless. Not to mention it was a lot of work, and the fumes probably shaved several days off of my life.
I needed something that would save me the work and not clog up as easily as the rag. The drill with the wire wheel was still in the car, for grins, I doused a big area with the solvent and ran the wire wheel across it a few times at full tilt. Holy crap! Power tools and nasty chemicals to the rescue!! It cleaned up great. It slung tar and solvent everywhere, but that cleaned up pretty easily - with yet more solvent. (so I lost a few more days of my life - they probably wouldn't have been much fun anyway) When all was said and done, I scraped about 10lbs of tar off of the floors, and was ready to prep the interior for a fresh coat of paint.
Say goodbye tar...

"Goodbye Tar"