Thanks to a thread I found on thenewx.com, I was able to do a much wanted repair this weekend. In short, the rain gutters on our roofs don't seem to hold paint very well. I noticed on mine that there is some other type of material under the paint in places aside from metal. In any event, the short story is that I sanded the gutters and bedlined them.

Here are a couple shots from my gutters, which should give you a good idea why I did this mod.





First step was to sand the channels.



Once they were sanded, I then washed both channels, then applied good old painter's tape.



Once I was happy with the tape, I then had to tape a bunch of newspaper extended out from all sides of the channels. Since I was using a spray-on bedliner, the last thing I really wanted was bits of bedliner all over the rest of the paint, windows, etc. Of course it was quite breezy as I was doing this, so battling the wind and newspaper really started to piss me off.



Once I had the paper in place, I sprayed on my first coat. The instructions say to spray at least 12" above whatever is being sprayed, but if I had done that, I would have ended up with bedliner everywhere. Instead, I sprayed it on at a pretty sharp angle (close to horizontal) which gave me about a 10" to 12" spray reach. Once the first layer was on, I waited about 30 minutes & applied another. In all, I put on 5 layers.



And the finished product:



I thought the black would stand out more, but I think it looks pretty nice. I honestly don't care though, as nobody can see that high unless they are pretty damned tall. Not sure how long it will last, but if/when I do this again, I won't be using the spray-on bedliner. After a few hours of multiple coats, pulling the tape off evenly was a bitch. The bedliner has a consistency of stretchy rubber, and the only way to pull the tape off cleanly would be to run a blade along the sides of the channels. I didn't really want to do that, so my edges are not very clean/straight. Next time, I'll use that 3" wide tape and just brush it on. It would take no time at all, and would actually improve the whole application process.

That looks really good! The rain gutters on my 05 have held up, but I'll definitely consider doing this when they start peeling. Thanks for sharing.

Steve,

Looks good.

Awesome job Steve. I'm coming over. You can do mines too

FLiPMaRC wrote: Awesome job Steve. I'm coming over. You can do mines too

Me to Flippy

Looks good Steve, wonder how it would look on white.

What time should we be there?

Nice work Steve. This seems like the easiest DIY method to fix the rain channels. If you use the brush method next time as you described, won't you still have the same problem when you remove the tape? Or do you expect the coats to be thinner on the edge and not as difficult to tear?

I've seen some small hair line cracks on mine so I will probably be doing this at some point too.

AZ_Path wrote:Nice work Steve. This seems like the easiest DIY method to fix the rain channels. If you use the brush method next time as you described, won't you still have the same problem when you remove the tape? Or do you expect the coats to be thinner on the edge and not as difficult to tear?

I've seen some small hair line cracks on mine so I will probably be doing this at some point too.

The spray-on bedliner I used sprays (or dries) fairly thin per coat, which is the reason why I went with 5 coats. Because of that & all the time involved, most of the coats were all dry when I peeled the tape, which led to my problem. But, if I use bedliner similar to what I used for my sliders, I'd only have to do 1 or 2 coats because you can really glop it on in a thick layer. The liner could still be "wet" enough to remove the tape without the tape & liner being stuck together.

The best part about this mod is that you can touch it up as needed with another layer of bedliner, which adheres extremely well to itself. Those of you wondering about this should climb up and really take a look at your gutters. Even my girlfriends Xterra, with about 9,000 miles on the odo, already has cracks in the gutter paint.

FLiPMaRC wrote:What time should we be there?

You could probably get a new paint job for the cost involved in driving out to Salt Lake. But hey, if you guys are nuts enough to do so, I'll certainly lend a hand when you show up

Great job, that did you use exactly? i mean the bed liner brand, and the difficulty taking off the tape was due to the bedliner itself right? would it help if you multilayered the tape?

pandarturo88 wrote:Great job, that did you use exactly? i mean the bed liner brand, and the difficulty taking off the tape was due to the bedliner itself right? would it help if you multilayered the tape?

I'll have to look at the brand when I get home tonight. The problem was that because each layer is so thin, I had to do multiple layers. And you pretty much have to wait until the first layer is dry before applying the next. In the end, the bedliner had bonded real well to the surface of the tape. I'd say that I have straight lines on 50% of the gutters, along with 50% with a bit more jagged edge because it wouldn't let go of the tape. As I mentioned earlier, I could have used a blade to get clean edges, but I simply couldn't see where the edges were under all the black bedliner, and I really didn't want to cut down into the paint.

NVSteve wrote: The liner could still be "wet" enough to remove the tape without the tape & liner being stuck together.

Makes sense. I has a similar issue with I epoxied my garage floor and did need to use a knife to cut the epoxy and allow the tape to be removed cleanly. I agree that taking a knife to your paint is only going to cause more problems.

How did you sand it? My first thought would be to cut a wood block the width of the channel and wrap it with sand paper. Just curious what you did.

NVSteve wrote:

FLiPMaRC wrote:What time should we be there?

You could probably get a new paint job for the cost involved in driving out to Salt Lake. But hey, if you guys are nuts enough to do so, I'll certainly lend a hand when you show up

Yeah I'm not that nuts. Tzvier and I know each other from another forum (Club3G.com). We were just kidding around

AZ_Path wrote:How did you sand it? My first thought would be to cut a wood block the width of the channel and wrap it with sand paper. Just curious what you did.

I can't remember the exact grit I used, but I tore a 1" strip from a sheet I had & folded it up into a little tiny 1/2" wide rectangle. I also used a small wire brush I had that is about as big as a toothbrush, both for scrubbing the gutter & for cleaning all the crap off the sandpaper. It probably took me all of 20 or 30 minutes to sand down both sides. By having a small piece folded up like that made sanding the sides of the channel even easier. I ended up shaping the paper into a an "L" shape so I could sand the side as I sanded the bottom. My only concern was to avoid sanding over the top of the gutter lip instead of only inside it. That's the primary reason I used such a small piece of sandpaper.

This is the stuff I used:



As I said, it goes on a bit thin for a bedliner.