OK everyone I asked about stripping paint off of my old riv rs-3 and you guys had some great ideas I would have never come up with. Here is a list of what was suggested:
brake fluid- be careful here may damage plastic, short soak only
badger sand blaster- sounds great for alot of paint removal. Planning on buying one
acohol- used 91% let it sit for several hours and it didn’t really start to work yet. I suspect this is a good slow removal of paint. Let sit overnight for best results
citrus cleaners- Many different products out there that were suggested, none that had really been tried if I recall right. So I tested fantastic orange cleaner that I picked up at marc’s for about 2 bucks. And this is my experiment with pics.
Southern Pacific lover I am sorry for stripping off this paint. But the old girl hit a truck and busted the front steps and twisted the frame and as much as ol Earl dosen’t like to get rid of a good ol girl she is headed for the scrap yard.
Hope everyone enjoys this thread.
Oh as a side note make sure all glass and lenses are off as well as any detail items you don’t want to break while scrubbing
I placed the rs-2 in a rubbermaid container with a lid that I bought at the dollar store. There were 5 containers and I paid $2.50 for them. I also used a $.75 toothbrush from the local grocery store to scrub the rs-2 with. I filled the container to cover half the train because I was also going to test the acohol in terms of how fast each started to strip the paint.
Well after about an hour or so I noticed the red started to come off with little pressure from the brush so I let it sit. After about 2.5 hours things were starting to come off rather nicely down to clean plastic. I did notice that the decals were not really affected by the solution yet. So I let it sit in the bath for another 8 hours while I slept. No effert really was required to get the paint and decals off. A little scrub from the brush and all was clean.
So this morning I tried the acohol bath at 91%. After 2 hours nothing seemed to want to come off. Even the red was not soft enought to start coming off. I eventually quit that experiment because my hands were getting extremely dry(couldn’t find the dang rubber gloves) and the smell was starting to get to me as well.
Glad it worked out for you. Having striped several manufacturers shells over the yeaars I have found that some paints will not react the same as others. for example, one of the earliest paint stripping projecs I did was an old AHM engine. A product called Simple Green removed the paint over night with the same results that you got. I used a large ziplok bag instead of a hard container as this would allow for a small amount of cleaner to cover the entire shell. Later on I needed to strip the paint from a Bachman Plus engine and the Simple Green omnly gave me a cleaner painted shell…did not even soften the paint. This is when I tried 91% alcohol. 10 min in the alcohol and the paint litteraly came off in sheets. In fact someplace downstairs there is a piece of wood with the entire side of paint stuck to it as it looked on the shell. An interesting thing I noted about Athearn paint is that it does not react the same to strippers. I bought 2 cabooses once, new, from the same source and one stripped fine in the alcohol and the other did not even soften. As far as using an air eraser, they work great. In fact I have access to a blasting booth at work that has real fine sand that I use to strip paint with and use it often. I will caution on this though. If you have a lot of shells to strip, find a cleaner (alcohol, etc…) to do the work for you. white air erasers do a good job it is very labor intensive to do a large amount of shells and you do get tired of standing in front of a blasting booth after a while. I know this from experience. I will usually try to strip the shell with a cleaner before I will blast it.
one more thing to note. A lot of people recomend to use brake fluid to strip with. It will remove paint just fine and in most instances won’t harm the plastic. The reason it does a good job of removing paint is because it is alcohol based. The proble arrises fromthe fact that we do not know all of the other chemicals that are in it. Also, one thing a fellow modeler found out the hard
Glad to see the citrus cleaner worked so well. As the previous post noted, different manufacturers use different types of paint so while you had good results this time, keep the others in mind in case you come across a shell that the citrus does not work on. Now you just need to strip the others and fire up the compressor.
BTW, you simply need to click on the ‘private messages’ link at the top of thedirectory page to access PMs.
thanks guys. I kept my acolhol close at hand. I figured I could use it for weathering. I have other makes that I will try the aco on but for now I guess I need to concentrate on getting stuff packed away for a move in the very near future.
