Stripping paint from plastic models


NC&StL

NC&StL

Member
I am sure this has been covered, but in different ways. So I will ask, what is the best way to strip a car or engine for receiving new paint. The last Pine Sol episode I had, left me with shredded skin.:confused:
 
91% alcohol. Get a tuperware tub with lid, pour in bottle to a bottle and a half. Let shell soak for about 5 hours or so. Depending on the paint could be less or more time till it comes off good.

Some athearn shells come off within an hour.
 
Search the forum. This question comes up every few months and there are a number of answers and discussions on it.
 
What NYSW FW45 said, 91% alcohol It's cheap and fast Takes me about 20mins or so to do freight cars,engine shells a bit longer all depends on who made them.

L
 
I mix about 5 parts 91% isopropyl alcohol and 1 part brake fluid. Takes 5 to 15 minutes. You cant use synthetic brake fluid, it has to be the older "natural" stuff.
 
I apperciate the info. The Pine Sol bath can be rough without the gloves. As my wife said, "I could have told you that...."
 
I use Scalecaot II paint stripper in an ultra sonic cleaner. I have never had any luck using 91% alcohol. If I don't use that I sand blast them.
 
TMLW said:
I use Scalecaot II paint stripper in an ultra sonic cleaner. I have never had any luck using 91% alcohol. If I don't use that I sand blast them.
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Can you more fully explain why you never had luck with this process when quite a number of folks claim it is very good?
 
91% alcohol works well on a number of manufacturer paint jobs, although a 20 year old factory paint job I tried to remove was quite stubborn. Im guessing that most factory paint jobs are acrylic because 91 wont work on enamel. Superclean works extremely well at removing enamel paint but doesnt work on acrylic. At one time I painted a coat of enamel over a factory paint job. Superclean removed my coat but didnt dent the factory paint which came off in minutes when soaked in 91.
 
beiland said:
Can you more fully explain why you never had luck with this process when quite a number of folks claim it is very good?
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I am not saying it doesn't work, I just have never had much luck using it. Usually it only removes some of the paint. Even with leaving it in there for days at a time. Scrubbing it takes some more off but with using the Scalecoat II stripper, 20 minutes and most shells are clean with little scrubbing.
 
Big Strip-off Test & Castrol Super Clean

I was doing a little 'research' on goggle and ran across this interesting site:
http://www.bonediggers.com/1-3/strip/strip.html

In the interest of getting as much of my original, pre-mistake kits back as possible, some of the leading products were assembled for this massive "strip-off" test in order to ascertain their real stripping abilities.

There is a reasonable cross-section of different types represented; Foams, gels, liquids, sprays, brush-ons, dips. Not only are they diverse in application, but also cost, from dirt cheap to rather pricey. They all share the convenience of being readily available and having a following among different groups of modelers.

Over the course of several months over a dozen kits were stripped. The results varied for several reasons which will be noted.
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Follow it through to the end, then find this :cool:

If I had started to write this story after my first use of this product, I may have saved a lot of time testing. I was totally stunned by its capabilities.

CSC is a clear purple liquid. It appears harmless enough, but don't be fooled. Even short physical contact with it will create a slime on you that is partially made up of your former top layer of skin! Never use this stuff without protecting yourself. It is a very strong degreaser and will breakdown your body oils like a stick of butter in a microwave. Only lots of cold running water will neutralize this effect. Better to wear gloves, then find out personally. It possesses a pleasant enough aroma in a ventilated area, but a strong chemical smell can really sneak up on you if you use it in tight spots.

I first purchased CSC for stripping clear-coated chrome from plastic wheels. When my trusty Formula 409 first failed to de-chrome an entire set of wheels, I was forced to look somewhere else. Easy Off worked well but I had some trouble getting the base coat, to which the chrome attaches to, to release from the plastic. Super Clean was new, and touted as a super tough cleaner so it got a shot. It stripped the wheels bare in under 15 minutes. It was the first of many pleasant surprises.

Much later, that I learned of its ability to strip paint. And boy, what I learned.

Castrol Super Clean is the stuff dreams are made of. Weeks after the initial experience I'm still a little giddy about the whole thing. Imagine having a clean, and I mean clean, slate from which to start. It is low maintenance, easy to use, cheap and extremely effective. The preferred method involves submerging the entire body into a plastic container filled with CSC for a couple hours or as needed. No sloppy brushing or breath-taking sprays. No scrubbing, most of the time. No special rituals at all, except proper safety precautions for exposed skin and eyes.

The submersion process requires a suitable vessel in which both parts and CSC can reside comfortably. The local 99¢ store had many useful options. A metal container should NOT be considered an option. Plastic or glass is best. CSC can make surfaces very slippery so I strongly suggest you stick with plastic. A quart sized container worked perfectly in my case.

Depending on the type of finish, the loosened paint usually falls away from the body in sheets. According to Castrol's literature, Super Clean works in two ways. It dissolves the grease and reduces its ability to adhere to a surface. This is what struck me about my initial encounter with it as a stripper. The paint simply slid right off the surface of the kit in nearly one piece. It dissolved the sandable primer underneath the top coat which remained mostly intact. This may also account for the smooth finish appearance of the plastic.

It's a stunning sight. At first I was so unbelieving that I tried another. Again total success! DANG! I tested my own nerve when I dropped a rare, MPC Color Me Gone '67 Charger into a fresh vat of CSC. This car wasn't primed so I didn't know how it would turn out. Three hours later I pulled a bright white Charger from the dingy liquid. WHOA! At that moment modeling seemed to become fun again, like it hadn't been for a long time. Instead of looking at these cars as mistakes piling up in the "someday pile, I saw a bright light at the end of modeling tunnel. "Go into the liiiiiiight...." p> A Lindberg Little Red Wagon body was place, half submerged in CSC and left to sit overnight. The A100 had many (too many) coats of Krylon Yellow and Plasti-Kote Schoolbus Yellow over a Krylon sandable primer. Detail was beginning to fade by the 100th coat and the color was still spotty.

The initial coat of the Krylon primer crazed the surface of the kit and the body was stripped one time previously, with Easy-Off. Even so, all the paint came off in the first soak.

The glass of the CMG Charger was also painted with the Metalflake green (?). It was time to see if there was any hope of making it useful again. In it went. After forcing myself away for a couple hours. I checked on it to find a perfectly clear, and virtually new windshield again. WOW!

Chrome plating removal is as good as it gets. While not as aggressive as SAK, CSC strips even the clear-coated chrome quickly and effectively. Even the gooey lacquer undercoating is loosened enough to brush free under warm running water.

Because this stuff works so well, I will now consider the purchase of builtups for possible projects in the future.

Bonuses:

Easy to use
No staining
Cheap
Biodegradable - Easy disposal
Can be used over and over

Bummers:

Submersion application restricts use to smaller kits
HARSH - watch this stuff. It eats skin.
Invasive - easily seeps into hidden areas
Any remaining unstripped paint can hold CSC and ruin the next paint job
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BTW, I found that site above thru a referenced posted over here on the old Atlas forum
http://forum.atlasrr.com/forum/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=28013
 
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Brake Fluid stripping

On that same Atlas forum I noted this posting about brake fluid as a stripper.
Older brake fluids were an alcohol base. some problems other than removing the paint from the fender on your car if it was spilled is that the alcohol used in the brake fluid has a great affinity for water which does not work too well in a brake system. It also had a fairly low boiling point which did not help the stopping ability of a car if it got hot. Most newer brake fluids are a silicone based material that holds up better in the systems and wont take the paint off of you fender if spilled.
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That reference to silicone should throw up some red flags. Not to many successful paint jobs will tolerate ANY silicone contaminates.

Here was another posting I found about using brake fluid:
As for 'safe' brake fluid - please test on your Kato and then report the brand and lot number. As well as the specific Kato shell. There are occasional success stories with brake fluid, but the documentation is missing. Reportedly it is the silicone additives that cause the plasticizers to be driven out of ABS plastic. And react with the stabilizers in common polystyrene. Brake fluid was the stripper of choice back in the good old days, but the institutional memory of model railroaders seems to not allow that decades pass and things change!
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Whatever you do, stay away from PineSol. It was recommended to me, and it nearly ate a Walthers coil car kit that I was stripping. Turned it into a curved coil car...the hoods were unusable after, and it took a lot of styrene, patience, and swearing to make the coil car even somewhat usuable after.

There are better options out there. Safer ones, too.

Timothy Dineen
 
Castrol Super Clean

Appears as though the original of this product was taken off the market back in around 2005-06....potential harmful health effects?? (it may have been an 'aerosol version' problem)

So now a little bit more investigation will be necessary to find a bonafied new source, and/or substitution/replacement ??
 
Super Clean Brands

Surprise, it wasn't that difficult. I wrote Castrol an email inquiring about their product. They wrote me back to inform me that I needed to contact another company.

Super Clean Brands, LLC
Products

I just got off of the phone to a very nice lady who informed me that it was likely that the Castrol product may have been pulled as a result of that product being sold to a new company,?....whatever. To her knowledge the product is the same as original, and is available at a number of retailers around the country.

But she also stated it was water based and environmentally friendly. I'm not sure the original product was water-based?

We'll just have to get some direct testimonial that this is true. It does appear it is still an excellent product for our purposes.
 
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Since this thread has been coming up with some pretty good answers; I thought I would pose my problem. I have a brand new, just bought, Roundhouse 2-8-0 still in the box. What I want to do is: remove the present lettering but not remove the main body paint. The work needs to be done is mostly on the tender. The engine and tender are both black, which I want to leave, but remove the lettering. Any ideas???
 
sd50f said:
Whatever you do, stay away from PineSol. It was recommended to me, and it nearly ate a Walthers coil car kit that I was stripping. Turned it into a curved coil car...the hoods were unusable after, and it took a lot of styrene, patience, and swearing to make the coil car even somewhat usuable after.

There are better options out there. Safer ones, too.

Timothy Dineen
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Not to be too off topic, but imagine what over time use would do to your floor!
 
Replacement for castrol super clean:
Zep purple cleaner, Home depot has it.
It's the same stuff just a better price.
I use that for stripping pait off all my engines and cars.
 
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We used to use old fashioned Dot-3 brake fluid on some plastic parts. Anyone that builds/restores cars knows how that stuff attacks enamel firewall/inner-fender paint under the hood. Seems to be harmless to many types of plastic - test first...
 
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