I’m working on refurbishing one of my earliest styrene buildings, and I’m wondering if there’s some way to remove the old acrylic paint without damaging the styrene. Any suggestions?
Clean up the building, using soap and water, drying it VERY WELL, then go ahead and paint over the old paint…would in most cases be the easiest route to take. Others may differ in thought…
I have an old Pola Station, that I have been wanting to freshen up, and that’s the approach I think I will take.
Ray Dunakin said:
… one of my earliest styrene buildings, … remove the old acrylic paint …
What paint is it? Craft acrylic? Artist acrylic? Scale modeling acrylic such as Testors Acryl, PollyScale, Tamiya?
Soak it in isopropyl alcohol, the higher the concentration the better. I usually use the stuff on the shelf at WalMart, which runs around 95%. Depending on how heavy the paint is will determine how long you need to soak it. When it starts to loosen, take a stiff brush (not a wire brush) and remove the paint. Rinse and Repeat if needed.
Chris
It’s craft acrylics. The building has a lot of scribed woodgrain, which I’d like to save.
Go with the rubbing alcohol. 91% can be found pretty easy. Soak for as long as you want, the paint should peel right off. If you need to scrub use a old toothbrush. Soak for 8 hours or so before scrubbing and see how much flakes off.
Yes, what they said.
I’m not sure what it would do to styrene but after we had a minor flood at model RR club because the urinal valve broke and my Bachmann train set track ended up in water 1/2 way up the ties on a municipal building,s basement carpet which was known to smell a bit moldy, I picked up the track and brought it home to rinse in Lysol in the bathtub on a shallow edged baking sheet.
I had painted the black plastic ties variously with rustoleum oxide red primer then craft acrylics over.
After sitting and soaking for a day because my messy health got in the way of me bending over edge of bathtub the Lysol had broken both types of paint free from the plastic ties.
Hmm, I shall have to try some more experiments with Lysol all purpose cleaner, lemon breeze scent.
Oh, Tamiya’s acrylics for scale models have come right off in just a few minutes in iso-whatever alcohol of almost any percentage on the shelf.
No effect on PollyScale acrylics but they are off the market now anyway.
Or those 8 color pads of watercolors for kids: one time just to see what would happen I took a color pad out of the plastic tray and dumped it in a jar of alcohol. Two weeks later the color pad wasn’t even soft.
I’m happy to report that the 91% isopropyl alcohol did the trick! I didn’t even have to soak it, just poured it on and scrubbed with an old toothbrush. The old paint came off quickly and easily.
Yay! Next thing to do is see how long it has to be soaked before it can be taken out and have drone rotor downwash blow the dissolved paint off. (http://largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-laughing.gif)
Found this on a WARGAMERS forum.
http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?267786-Paint-Strip-Miniatures-UK-Guide-(Dettol)
Paint stripping …use stuff like Simple Green (for folks from the USA and Canada) and Pine-sol as the method is the same. Soak for a few hours.
UK MODELLERS:-
*DETTOL is also advocated
*Dettol works superbly on plastic and metal and is totally safe (both for you and your health/enviroment/love lives/ parent realtionships!).
Needs the object to be soaked for a few hours and then scrubbed etc.,