how do I get all of this factory crap off of my floorboards

[us4736]

i used dry ice ,the ice house buy me cut it on his band into 2 inch bricks they lasted hours .i did the hole car in about 3 hours then the clean up sucks that takes time

[RandyMolson]

i'm also confused with the earlier post describing how messy it is...

i don't get it. was not my experience. really

How can chiseling chunks of semi-frozen tar not be messy? I did it outside on a hot summer day, which was kind of stupid in hindsight, but I can't always have perfect conditions to work on the car.

Some dry ice method descriptions make it sound like the tar pops off the floor in clean perfect sheets, and that was absolutely not the case with me. The dry ice hardened the tar, but most of it had to be chiseled. That produced airborne chips. The chips landed everywhere, then melted back into tar. Thus, the mess.

[kcdonahue]

Dry ice worked great for me but left a huge mess like Randy mentions... Clothes, gloves rags etc. The tar that fell out onto my garage floor even left some nice stains where it remelted and didn't get cleaned up right away.

The way I did it: I pre-scored the tar boards with a razor knife and then used about 15 or so pounds of dry ice working on a section at a time. I would let each spot sit for about 30 mins and then begin beating on it with a big ass rubber mallet. I also used a strong paint scraper after the mallet to get eveything that I could(like a chisel). In between each beating session I cleaned up all of the lose tar into a big heavy duty trash bag cause the shit was everywhere. To get the left overs off I used a wire wheel, Citristrip and Goof Off. Goof off worked great as a final cleaner but it also removed much of the factory primer that was still on the floor. After the floor was clean of tar and generally rust free I treated it with Metal ready (3-4 times just in case, using the wire wheel to remove any of the converted or lose rust) and then painted the shit out of everything with POR-15. I still have some rust holes to deal with but life caught up with me shortly after I did this work and the car is still in pieces....

Hope this makes some sense. I'm a bit inebriated....

Casey