The first thing I did after getting RedRock home was a to remove the dealer sticker. Dealers have this bad habit of taking the liberty of plastering their dealer stickers on the back of cars without even asking customers for their blessing first.
This is my car, and I do not endorse dealer stickers.
Some dealers use a vinyl material for their dealer stickers and they are fairly straight forward to remove. Others – as in the my case here – use this horrible plastic badge, backed with double-sided sticky-tape! This is not cool!
So I headed to the local pharmacy on the way home, and bought a roll of the cheapest dental floss available. This particular container was all of a buck-fifty and minty to boot. The trick is to try to soften the badge’s sticky tape with a hot air gun. But just a little; don’t want to damage anything. Then, while wearing some mechanics gloves, get a long strip of dental floss and slowly work the floss to slice the sticky tape. This takes patience and a fair bit of dental floss; it frays as you go, so one must keep an eye on things.
Eventually, the tag comes off and leaves this nasty mess:
Fortunately, this particular cheap ass tag must have come from China because it had some really crappy backing tape. Had they used the good stuff (it is expensive) the process would have taken longer. So, how does this crappy residue come off? First you very carefully peel this stuff off with your fingers. And I mean, very carefully.
Then grab plenty of paper towels and use something like this:
This is pre-paint prep solvent. This is NOT thinner and it is designed specifically to remove this kind of mess. No, it won’t work immediately. Best results are obtained by dabbing a paper towel with this solvent, then applying to the rubbery residue and repeat.
Eventually the stuff works into the rubbery residue left by the sticker and it starts to peel up in little turds. Takes time, but it works. With a little more elbow grease, the result looks like this:
Word of caution: this solvent does remove any and all wax. It goes without saying, I ended up applying a fresh coat of wax to the rear trunk deck.
Add insult to injury, the next sticker to be removed was this:
Epic fail on the part of the “tech” doing the oil change. On a car with a windshield this raked, placement of the Oil Change sticker just makes no sense. In addition, this is totally redundant because the Driver Information Center clearly shows remaining oil life. So this sticker was also quickly removed.
