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Our 1970s Coleman "Steel Belted" Cooler, Refurbished and Repurposed [1]

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Date: 2025-03-23

Here we have a vintage Coleman 52 quart cooler, made by union labor on American soil in 1977. They’re called ”steel belted” coolers due to the metal wrapping around the sides, sandwiched between the upper and lower plastic elements. Damn, I’m getting old when shit from the 1970s is “vintage”..

It happens that these are now considered somewhat collectable, with examples in good condition going for $100-200. I’ve seen them described by a few YouTubers as one of the “Holy Grails” of garage sales. How about that?

July, 1977. Back when we made things like this here.

We inherited this one from Mrs. R’s parents back in the 1990s and have more or less treated it with benign neglect since then, using it regularly for its intended purpose — keeping stuff cold. It’s not in bad shape overall, but it does have some issues. I decided to see what I could do to fix it up.

The first step was to assess the overall state of this thing. These coolers have a plastic bottom over a steel substrate. The plastic has worn away at the corners and elsewhere on the bottom from decades of use and abuse, and now the underlying steel is rusting.

I couldn’t figure out how to remove the plastic bottom and get to the metal without destroying it. So that’s a bit of a problem.

All four corners look like this. Or worse.

Not only that, the plastic has yellowed from UV exposure. The usual way to whiten yellowed plastic involves soaking it in hydrogen peroxide in full sunlight for a few hours. The thing is, hydrogen peroxide is highly corrosive, and using it here would only make the steel underneath rust more — It would seep in through every crack in that plastic, and there are lots of cracks.. My options were limited.

The first thing I did was to scrub it with soap and water, using #0004 steel wool and a toothbrush to get at the corners. That didn’t do much beyond removing the dirt and spider nests.

So I tried, in no particular order: Cleanser, a hydrogen peroxide-soaked rag, mineral spirits, bleach, oxalic acid, trisodium phosphate, ammonia, rubbing compound, uranium hexafluoride, brake cleaner, starting fluid, paint thinner, ferric acid, turpentine, WD-40, drain cleaner, vinegar, muriatic acid, paint stripper, baking soda, pure alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, oven cleaner, kerosene, gasoline, benzene, dissolved copper sulfate, and window cleaner. If I had a sand blaster, I would have tried that, too. In short, I threw everything I had in the shop at it.

OK. In reality, I just scrubbed it with Bar Keeper’s Friend cleanser and fine steel wool, toiling away for several eternities. But I did actually try vinegar, rubbing compound, and TSP, none of which did anything. Tip: Avoid acetone.

This represents about 20 minutes of hard labor. It’s going to be a long day.

I’ve finally got the plastic as white as it’s going to get. I’d been thinking about how to deal with the rust on the bottom and decided to use rust converter and epoxy. The rust converter is painted onto the metal and chemically reacts with the iron oxide to stabilize it, turning the rust black. The epoxy will keep the bottom from getting too much more scraped up, as long as it’s not dragged about on, say, a garage floor.

This is the best repair I could come up with.

With the bottom plastic taken care of, I removed the lid and all of the hardware, except for the hinges and side handles, which are riveted on and can’t be accessed from the inside. I could have drilled them out and used a pop riveter to reattach them, but I opted to leave them as-is. Pop rivets look like crap, anyway.

Surface rust; should clean right up.

The hardware was all in good shape. There was some superficial rust but polishing compound and #0004 steel wool took care of it in short order.

Check out the cool bottle opener built into each handle. I don’t think they had twist-off bottle caps yet in the 70s and glass-bottled beverages were more common then, so this would be a real handy feature back in the day. Shit, it’s handy today!

Note the warning about children becoming trapped in the cooler. I think they now have to be escapable.

Here, I’ve shined up the latch and lid handle. There was some rust on the screws so they’re getting a couple hour soak in Evaporust.

The two pieces of white nylon are plugs to cover the holes in the lid where they injected expandable foam insulation.

The hinges got the rust converter treatment, too.

Hinges are riveted on to the lid and can’t be easily removed.

I’ll spare you all of the detail of the metal preparation. It was the usual thing — Sand to bare metal, fill the major dents with Bondo, sand some more, then tape off the parts that won’t get painted.

A side note: I don’t know what kind of paint Coleman used, but paint stripper wouldn’t touch that shit. I left some on the lid for better than two hours and all it did was make the paint shinier. I ended up sanding it off.

Ready for paint.

I gave it a coat of primer, wet sanded it with 2000 grit, put on one more coat, then wet sanded that, too.

Time for a beer and hash break! It’s taken seven years after legalization to finally get some decent hash around here..

At last, I’m ready for the final paint. I used Rust-oleum “Hunter Green”. It’s not an exact match, but it’s close. I was surprised it took two whole cans. I’d only bought one and had to go back to the hardware store for another. Multiple trips to the hardware store for a single project is the story of my life. It once took me four trips to install a new water heater.

Messy. But it’s too cold to paint outside.

Next day. The paint has dried and it’s ready to reassemble. There isn’t much to do here, just the hinge screws and latch hardware. It took longer to take the masking tape and plastic film off.

And here it is. The gloss paint sure looks nice, but it does show up a few dents I missed during metal prep. It looked perfect in primer..

The replacement “Coleman” sticker was two bucks plus 69 cents shipping.

It’s again ready to keep mass quantities of beer ice cold. Actually, this won’t be used as a working cooler any more. Its new job is to store extra blankets and sheets in the spare bedroom. It’s kind of a demotion, but I’ll call it a well-deserved retirement after almost fifty years of faithful service.

Another look. That’s four coats of paint.

While I was waiting for the paint to dry, I built some shelves. Our kitchen is smallish and we needed more storage space. That’s $200 in lumber right there. I could have bought a couple of pre-built storage cabinets, but you have to take whatever sizes they have and they probably would have cost more than the wood.

Besides, to paraphrase Lawn Chair Larry, “A guy’s gotta have something to do”.

That fridge is a true survivor, still works perfectly. I saw a lot of them converted to frat house kegerators back in my college days; I’m sure most of them are long gone by now.

Take care, everyone!

-ER

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