24 hours straight with two strippers...

[DaleB]

Sure Clint, I'm always interested in exploring options.

I saw a place locally that does dry ice blasting. Like sandblasting but using dry ice pellets... no residue from the media and supposed to strip anything. I emailed them and the guy called today (obviously a small business owner, it's Sunday). He said the last time they did automotive base/clearcoat, which I can only assume this is, they had to use methylene chloride stripper to remove the paint and dry ice to clean it up afterward at a cost of about $13.50 per square foot. Ummmmm.... thanks, but... no.

I'm sure all of these strippers work great for some paints. I know Citristrip works great on spray paint, enamel, w?od finishes, etc. I've never seen it just sit there and do nothing. PTI swears their stuff removes urethane and epoxy paints. But they're not doing much at all with this stuff.

[Zero4Zulu]

I stripped my entire plane with Klean Strip from the hardware store. I worked in about 2 foot sections. Smeared it on with a cheap paint brush and didn't really let it sit long. I used plastic scrapers to push the wrinkled paint off quickly then pressure washed off the the remaining stripper before it dried. The primer required two more applications of stripper and it didn't wrinkle up like the top coat of paint. I put the stripper on and scrubbed it around with plastic dish scrubbers and pressure washed immediatly before the stripper dried.

I learned that some cans of stripper didn't have the potency of others. I tried to find the newest cans on the shelf. The chemical evaporates very quickly and you can tell when it just isn't working so just wash it off and reapply more.

I tried using rubber gloves and it was just a pain. I actually just learned to be careful to not get it on me and actually wore shorts while doing the job. If I did get some on me I could feel it and washed it off right away. Never had any burns.

The stripper worked fine on the fiberglass. Didn't leave it on long and haven't seen any softening of the glass. I haven't repainted my plane yet.

My pressure washer is one of the small electric ones that is ready to go as soon as the trigger is pulled.

It took 2 days to strip a wing and similar for the fuselage.

Temp outside was mid 70's.

[Clint B]

Hi Dale, the stuff is AccuChem #945 remover. You won't want to use it on any fiberglass parts, it's that bad!

[DaleB]

Well, here's an interesting update.

Last night I pulled all of the inspection covers off the bottom of the plane. I figured this was a great opportunity to test the strippers on paint over metal, as opposed to paint over fiberglass. So, I set up four test pieces. Two were unaltered, just wiped down with a rag to get the oily belly scuzz off of them. The other two I scuffed up really well with 80 grit sandpaper (which didn't make it through the clear coat, the sanding dust was all white).

One of each got PTS-202, one of each got Citristrip and I covered them loosely with plastic to keep evaporation to a minimum. One was left on the bench with no stripper as a control. After roughly 15 hours, I found some pretty surprising, gratifying results.

#1 - PTS-202 on scuffed paint, about 80-85% removed.
#2 - A tie between PTS-202 on un-scuffed paint, and Citristrip on scuffed paint. About half removed, maybe more. Both had loosened and bubbled up the middle of the piece, leaving the paint near the edges soft but still stuck pretty well.
#3 - Citristrip on un-scuffed paint, not a lot of progress.

I was able to verify that there was no primer under the paint, and the aluminum was not consistently or heavily scuffed before painting. I cleaned off #1 and #2 and gave them all another coat of Citristrip, then sanded the last panel (#5) and coated it as well, laying it on thicker near the edges.

So it looks like both do reasonably well on painted metal, especially if the clear coat is roughed up really well. It's too bad the parts that need stripping and repainting the worst are all fiberglass. I'll have to try attacking those parts with 60 or 80 grit and see if the strippers do any better with the finish broken.

I'm going to try some 3M vinyl on the inspection covers and we'll see how that does. It's actually a pretty good match for the existing paint color.