First little attempts to polish...

Very dirty work but so incredibly rewarding. I only have a $49 HFT polisher and at the slow speed 600-800 RPM with quite a bit of pressure applied, the motor gets hot quickly. I would be amazed if that polisher makes it through polishing the entire trailer. This is all only the first of three polishing rounds using coarse grade NuShine C9.

Hehr window

Another great post on vintageairstream.com on repairing/rebuilding old Hehr windows. There are also similarly great posts on Airforums on the same topic with step by step guides. I had to fix at least one window that was in particular rough shape with a broken glass window and dents. See below. Now I will do all (outer windows) because the 58 yr old seals are dried out, brittle or gone altogether.

License plate light

After some sanding, painting, polishing and reassembling...

Marker lights

Were restored the. The little sockets that receive the screws fastening the lens to the housing were quite rusty but they still work. Polishing out 58 year old lenses with NuShine works great. It takes a little while if you do it by hand as I did but it is also pretty rewarding.

Dull lenses

After some hand polishing

Front housing after polishing with NuShine

Tail lights

With great hesitation, I finally worked on Bella's taillights.  Despite the many detailed guides on how to refurbish the old Hehr taillights and the teardrop marking lights on Airforums and especially this one on vintageairstream.com it seemed still a little intimidating. There are 2 products that helped me greatly with the job and these are: 3M 2229 tape to seal between light housing and the trailer and 1/8" gasket sheets from your favorite automotive store to cut gaskets to seal between the light housing and the lens.
The '58 trailer had a little different wiring too. Bella actually had a red and a brow wire for left and right turning, respectively, a green wire for the running lights and a white wire for ground. So far so good with modern 7-way plugs. But Bella had also a black wire fro breaking lights not known in modern TV's. It took me some reading on Airforums to learn that you simple ignore the wire or, if you want to use that second filament in the 1176 bulbs combine the black wires from the lights with one of the active wires.
   

Doesn't look so good...

Amazingly, the light housing cleans up nicely after some sanding with 120 and 400 sanding paper. Just Rustoleum spray-painted. The Chrome rings and the lenses polished out beautiful with a little NuShine C9

Shore power

I really wanted to plug the trailer into 120V to see check the electrical. The old inlet is something that I, however had not seen before and a modern standard 30 Amp shore cable would not work. So I replaced the inlet.
Very much to my surprise every single 120V light fixture inside the trailer works and the exhaust fan on top of the stove is working too! As fro the 12V situation, that one is not as straight forward but more about that later.

Curtains

I believe this is one of the original curtains. There are 14 of them and we tried to wash them as gently as possible but they are just too brittle. Too bad because I LOVE the space age pattern. Oh well, luckily the curtains still all have the plastic gliders and we have a good friend with a textile/sowing business. They will all serve as templates and be redone with new fabric.
Suggestions for good quality fabrics are welcome.