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was doing a search for liquid mask .. hobby store cant get it .. and ran into this video to remove paint from both body types

a little work .. would be good for rare bodys

[youtube]085nJyj4TBM[/youtube]

I've tried that. It does in fact take the paint off, but it also leaves the body very brittle and foggy. I wouldn't do it again.

By my count, there was 5 hours of waiting involved with that procedure. And, as Mikey said, I've done the DOT4 thing and got hazing with the body I tried to clean.

I wouldn't put brake fluid anywhere near a body, it attacks the plasticisers in the lexan making it brittle. Might be okay for a display body. It makes the lexan cloudy as it breaks the plastic down, and as it is inside the lexan there is no way to polish it out.

An example from me. I painted some 1/5th bike fairings for the worlds a couple of years ago, so was working to a deadline. I messed up the striping, paint bled under the masking. Looked around for what I had to hand to fix it, and used some brake fluid to quickly strip back the paint bleed to get the body finished. By the end of the race meeting the small area stripped with brake cleaner had cracked, and after another meeting it had split right across the area. The body was repaired with a patch across the back of it and the untreated rest of the body lasted a couple of years before being replaced. I don't think it's a coincidence that the only place it cracked easily was where I had treated it with brake cleaner.

Even polycarbonate safe paint removers aren't perfect, there are many variations of polycarbonate that what will work on one body will not necessarily work fine on another.

I've had poor result using brake fluid in the past. The best stripper I have found has been nitro fuel with a high nitro content.

Purple Power

shodog wrote:I've had poor result using brake fluid in the past. The best stripper I have found has been nitro fuel with a high nitro content.

Me too, it won't work miracles but it worked better than anything else I've tried. It works fantastic for wiping off minor overspray, too. But I doubt even nitro fuel will do a great job removing 2-decades-old Pactra paint.

I used dot3 to remove paint off my RC10T body. The body was already damaged, so I did it with out worrying too much. It worked well. The only hazy parts were hazy before I used it. It doesn't seem to be any more brittle than before.



The roof isn't hazy, its just the reflection from the flash.

How long did you let it sit in the dot3 brake fluid?

Also good questions are what kind of paint was previously on the body, and how old was the paint?

The paint was put on when the truck was new, so twenty years. I believe it was Tamyia paint, but it was a long time ago. I slopped it on pretty thick before work. When I got home I wiped it with a fluid soaked paper towel. 90% of the paint wiped off pretty easy. I poured the fluid on a few places and let it soak for a few more hours. A few spots the paint was stubborn and I had to rub it pretty hard with a soaked paper towel. In a few of the hard to reach places I did use a tooth pick. once the paint was off I washed the body really well with dish soap to get the brake fluid off.

I had watched the video talking about the dot4 before I did it. The video made it seem like dot3 was ineffective. To be honest it really wasn't that much work. I used to have a old car that leaked break fluid from the ABS actuator. Believe me brake fluid will eat the paint off anything if allowed to soak long enough. It ate the paint off the car inside the engine bay right down to bare steal. I guess the problem is at what point will it damage lexan? It did not appear to do any damage to mine.

CCC wrote:The paint was put on when the truck was new, so twenty years. I believe it was Tamyia paint, but it was a long time ago.

Tamiya paint comes off easy. You don't even need DOT3 for that, I think it'll come off with rubbing alcohol or even Windex.

Pactra paint is a whole other matter. It bonds to Lexan and 20-year-old Pactra is practically impossible to remove--at least without harsh chemicals and hazing of the Lexan.

I've got an old Kyosho Outrage body that was painted horribly and never ran. I think I'll try stripping it and see how it goes. If it goes well I will try it on my daughters slash body. The paint came out horrible on it and it looks like junk.

Coelacanth wrote:

CCC wrote:The paint was put on when the truck was new, so twenty years. I believe it was Tamyia paint, but it was a long time ago.

Tamiya paint comes off easy. You don't even need DOT3 for that, I think it'll come off with rubbing alcohol or even Windex.

Pactra paint is a whole other matter. It bonds to Lexan and 20-year-old Pactra is practically impossible to remove--at least without harsh chemicals and hazing of the Lexan.

LOL

To be honest the more I think about it, it probably was the Parma brand paint. It was metallic and it was airbrushed on. It wasn't Pactra.

I stripped the 15-year-old+ Pactra florescent pink, florescent yellow and white paint from my old Andy's Lo Profile LX-T body a few years ago and it turned out decent without any hazing or brittleness. I used shop rags soaked in generic DOT3 fluid and it took probably about 2 weeks of sitting, scrubbing and picking to get it all off.

Could the hazing some of you guys are seeing be a result of the previous painter scuffing the inside of the lexan like your supposed to do before painting? I scuffed my Pro-Line Wrangler, B44 and Viper bodies with some 1500 or 2000 grit paper on the inside before painting and it looked hazy like people are describing.