Paint Stripping Your Vehicle at Home

Posted on: 16 December 2015

The process of paint stripping your vehicle can be extremely dirty and time consuming, especially if you own a car with very old paint. It may take up to a few days for you to fully strip the vehicle successfully of its old paint. When looking to strip your vehicle, there are lots of methods that you could use, but remember to only centre your attention on one part of the vehicle at once. Sanding, media blasting, and chemical stripping are the most common ways of stripping your vehicle of old paint. Here are some details about them.

Sanding

With this method, you have to properly prepare for the job by arming yourself with a sander loaded with sandpaper. If you're looking to strip your car entirely of pain, you must buy an entire roll of special disks for the dual action sander and remember to frequently change them between the various panels of your car. You could, for example, use a disk for the left wing of the car, another for the door panel, and so on.

You should also seek to prevent too much heat from forming on the surface of the metal. You can do that by making sure to not hold the sander in a single spot for extended periods of time. Instead, seek to fan out over broader surfaces just like you would with a buffer.

Media Blasting

In this process, a compressed air machine that propels media particles is used in order to strip your car of old paint. The media particles are generally soda based, which is a much softer material than sand. This process is also known as soda blasting, which differs from regular sandblasting since it uses softer particles that don't have the same impact on the surface of the vehicle. This is a common method of removing paint from a surface that may be damaged by sand, such as fiberglass. In addition to that, this procedure also requires a higher skill level and more space. The bigger the surface that you need blasted the bigger blaster you will need.

Chemical Stripping

If none of the other options suits you, you can find several chemical solutions on the market that will effectively remove the paint from your vehicle. This process requires more time and patience, but is a great way to make sure that the job gets done without any damage to the car. If there are multiple layers of paint on the car, this process will remove them one by one.

You can use a simple paintbrush to apply the solution to the vehicle part, wait a few hours, and then scrape it off. Continue doing this procedure until the entire body is clean of paint.

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