Cleaning up black windshield goop
 

I'm driving my dads old 1982 245 Diesel.

The windshield is the factory original, and the black goop they used to seal around it is oozing out in places.

The stuff gets on the edges of the sunshade, which then ends up on the headliner, etc. Not pretty.

I'd like to try and scrape off as much of this as I can to minimize the mess.

Any suggestions? I'm thinking that maybe wooden coffee-stirrers could be used to scrape out as much as I can.

I just want to get as much of the oozed-out stuff eliminated.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

-Tom in SoCal

Biodiesel, naptha, d-limonene (orange oil solvent), wd-40, etc.

Thanks Ngoma.

Eg ads that stuff is a pain to be around... Very sticky and it doesn't scrape off well at all; trying to scrape it off just seemed to pull more out of the gap so made things worse.

so I scraped a bit, tried wiping with rags, etc and didn't really find a good solution.

Once the globs were gone, solvents did work well on the remains. But it still took a lot of rags and a lot of time.

Being outside in the sun on a 100 degree day may have made it worse.

Hateful stuff. Best treated as a rattlesnake I think -- leave it alone and work around it if possible.

-Tom in SoCal.

Toluene was another one.

Good idea. Maybe you could carefully tape over it?

Try a little bit of biodiesel, if you can find some. It does a remarkable job of dissolving this kind of tar-like stuff (or really anything sticky -- even works great on pine pitch and other natural stuff) and it seems to be safe for interior materials. My wagon's PO had covered large areas of the interior door panels for years with duct tape after some of the door pull mounting points broke, and after I fixed those and removed the tape there was terrible residue left over - some biodiesel took it right off and the panels have held up great since.

Make sure you get pure biodiesel if you try this, though -- sometimes you'll find B20 (20% bio, 80% diesel) being sold as biodiesel, because it's a partial blend, but you'd regret using that because your interior will smell like diesel!

If you do find some B99 or B100 biodiesel that's accessible in your area, incidentally, you may also get good results from putting some in your fuel tank -- biodiesel can (temporarily) revive tired injection pump seals so that might be a way to slow down your leaks for a while until you spring for a reseal.