The Tiny Texas Tumbleweed (TTT) is the RV52 world headquarters current RV. You can read all the particulars in the linked article.

But SHE was dirty. Real dirty. If you look at the picture above it had a nasty, dirty, greasy looking grime all over the sides of the darned thing. And yes, it WAS worse where the air conditioner was dripping.

So we did what everyone does and we did a search on the internet to see how other people are doing it.

We also got REAL CLOSE up and put a little spit on our fingers and rubbed it. Oddly, it didn’t seem topical – which was a bad sign in my humble opinion.

So we thought… how hard can this be?

So we promptly went to Walmart and bought 3 different kinds of cleaners all saying that they remove mildew, black streaks and road grime.

The first stuff we tried was Camco’s Blue Bottle titled “Black Streak Remover”. I’m not even going to give you the link because I’m not a believer. It didn’t even make a dent in the streaks. The dirt laughed at us.

The next stuff we tried was Armor-All Gray Bottle titled “Tire and Wheel Cleaner”. Wheels seem like dirty things. Again, didn’t make a dent in the dirt at all. Nothing. Didn’t budge the dirt.

Next we tried the Armor-All Orange Bottle titled “Wheel Cleaner”. Now this stuff worked pretty good. It went on VERY similar to the way the foaming friendly bubbles called Scrubbing Bubbles goes on. This stuff DID make a dent. But still it was very hard going and it still left behind a little bit of the gray dirt. Even worse, it seemed to harm some of the decals.

We did try the Scrubbing Bubbles but that was not as good as the Armor-All Orange Bottle.

But this was slow going and hard slogging. After about 2 hours all we had done was in the picture below on a single side. You can see how far we got and you can see how hard Sheri was working with a course brush.

You see we also found out whether you use a brush, a rag, or a sponge made a difference too.

That first night, Sheri’s son says “just buy some of that cleaner called Purple Power and use my power washer on “remove flesh” setting”.

We bought, we applied, and we put the power washer on “argon laser mode”.

Nothing.

The power washer did NOTHING. NOTHING at all.

Then we started to cry.

What started out like fun work with water in the Texas sun was turning out to be nearly impossible work with way too much elbow grease required.

I’ll tell you what we did.

REMEMBER – Sheri and I are not paint & body people. So please don’t do this for yourself without expert paint & body oversight and advice. This is just what we did… you are on your own.

In a fit of frustration, Sheri went and tried our Bar Keepers Friend.

Praise the Good Lord. That Bar Keeper’s Friend took the grime off with the most predictability, least effort, and seemed to not hurt the paint finish.

I’m not going to butter you up. It was still a bunch of work. But we were able to shine up the TTT and feel pretty good about the old girl being seen in public.

Then we found a finish that even helped rid the grime just one step more and that was the icing on the cake: Nu Finish.

Love to hear about your cleaning stories. I sure hope it went better for you than for RV52!