"I have often marveled at the thin line which separates success from failure."

So I found this thing wadded up in a bin today...I laid it out to check out its condition - it's slightly flat but whole (minus one ripped area) and original.  There's some overspray from when the car was repainted back in the 80's.

I remembered back a few years when I was reading about how some random dude cleaned old rubber with Goop hand cleaner - the cheap stuff you find at the hardware store on the bottom shelf - it's about $3 for a tub and it cleans hands very well - no matter what's on them - they're clean when you're done.

For shits and grins (and so I could say I 'did something' with the car today), I wiped some on the small corner of the pan seal that ripped - figuring that if I screwed something up, it'd only be a corner piece and not the whole thing.  If you think about it for a minute - you'll quickly realize that my logic makes zero sense.

This was the first pass - I cleaned the corner piece and then mated it up to the tear...not bad!  The rubber is soft and clean.  All of the dirt, adhesive and weird crap came right off with very little effort.

Here are those two pieces mated up again once I cleaned the other piece.

Not bad!

I may use this when I mate the body and pan with an adhesive - who knows how long it'll be there before I split them again to restore the car (maybe two years from now, maybe never).

So, yeah...I accomplished something small today - but it may have saved me a ton of time later.