The stickies have arrived

I was adjusting one of the vents in the middle of the dashboard and discovered that it is suffering from the well known Ferrari ‘stickies’ that plague many older cars. Basically, the coating on the plastic begins to separate from the actual plastic moulding leaving a nasty black sticky residue.

Luckily for me, this is really the only place I have found it. Not doubt it has been caused by sun exposure over the years, given the position of the vent on the dash. The question now is how to fix it? The challenge is that there are so many remedies out there, finding the best one is the next step. It’ll also be a little tricky to get right into the vents and I’ll no doubt need to clean the complete surface and lot of reside is going to come off I reckon.

The problem would be far worse if it was on the buttons for the A/C in the centre console. Finger crossed that it doesn’t start appearing there as well. Being on the vent in the dash means that I don’t to worry about it too much but I’ll need to start working on a solution because the reside does make quite a mess and will only continue to deteriorate.

In good news the 3D printed cog for the A/C controller that deteriorated appears to do the job when inserted in the controller. The next step will be to get the 3D people to make me a few copies that I can make available to people if they want. No idea on a prices as yet because I need to work out how many to make and what the actual, rather than test, costs are going to be. I’ll certainly post an update when I have that sorted, hopefully in the next few weeks.

The next 3D challenge will be to copy the F355 ashtray body, which I had lots of drama with back in the day.

Hopefully, being a bigger item it will be easier to 3D print this and perhaps make it out of stronger material to prevent the arms from snapping as you see above.

As always, once one projects ends another appears. Let’s see what witchcraft people recommend to get rid of the ‘stickies’.