Question for you model builders....

[Slappy The Vulcan]

Picked up a playmates Voyager at a thrift store for .99 cents, It's in BAAAAD Shape. it looks like somebody painted a few of the windows black and white with model paint....but never finished....it also looks (as near as I can tell that they tried to remove the paint on some of said windows with thinner maybe. this has caused the paint on one of the phaser strips to smear causing discoloration on part of the upper saucer. any way I can remove the paint without causing more "damage" and possibly fix any discoloration? I'd love to post pics, but I have no Idea how....any help on that would be much appreciated as well.

 

[Ziz]

The only right way to do it is to just strip it completely and start from scratch. Barring that, pics would help to suggest a way to proceed. Get set up with one of the common photo hosting sites like ImageShack or PhotoBucket.

 

[Just_Bob]

Slappy The Vulcan said:
Picked up a playmates Voyager at a thrift store for .99 cents, It's in BAAAAD Shape. it looks like somebody painted a few of the windows black and white with model paint....but never finished....it also looks (as near as I can tell that they tried to remove the paint on some of said windows with thinner maybe. this has caused the paint on one of the phaser strips to smear causing discoloration on part of the upper saucer. any way I can remove the paint without causing more "damage" and possibly fix any discoloration? I'd love to post pics, but I have no Idea how....any help on that would be much appreciated as well.

Dear Lieutenant Slappy,

Take digital photos of the model and head over to photobucket.com. Make an account and upload your photos and then, if I recall correctly, cut and paste the IMG code within your Trek BBS post. Please keep in mind that you must have 100 posts before you are able to post images.

However, post the IMG code as you like and one of us, with over 100 posts, will gladly assist with the display of your images.

 

[Gen. Jack O'Neill]

Slappy The Vulcan said:
Picked up a playmates Voyager at a thrift store for .99 cents, It's in BAAAAD Shape. it looks like somebody painted a few of the windows black and white with model paint....but never finished....it also looks (as near as I can tell that they tried to remove the paint on some of said windows with thinner maybe. this has caused the paint on one of the phaser strips to smear causing discoloration on part of the upper saucer. any way I can remove the paint without causing more "damage" and possibly fix any discoloration? I'd love to post pics, but I have no Idea how....any help on that would be much appreciated as well.

Try Pine-sol.

The Playmates Voyager was molded in it's base color, so it might only lighten the smeared on paint a bit. But Pine-sol and a bit of elbow grease might do the trick to remove it.

If you're not planing on using the eltronics in it, just submerge it in the Pine-sol for a few days. The paint will bubble and peal right off. I use it for restoring and rebuilding models all the time.

Short of that, the only other thing I can think of is wet sanding the smeared areas with fine grain sandpaper to remove the surface area.

 

[Just_Bob]

Gen. Jack O'Neill said:

Slappy The Vulcan said:
Picked up a playmates Voyager at a thrift store for .99 cents, It's in BAAAAD Shape. it looks like somebody painted a few of the windows black and white with model paint....but never finished....it also looks (as near as I can tell that they tried to remove the paint on some of said windows with thinner maybe. this has caused the paint on one of the phaser strips to smear causing discoloration on part of the upper saucer. any way I can remove the paint without causing more "damage" and possibly fix any discoloration? I'd love to post pics, but I have no Idea how....any help on that would be much appreciated as well.

Try Pine-sol.

The Playmates Voyager was molded in it's base color, so it might only lighten the smeared on paint a bit. But Pine-sol and a bit of elbow grease might do the trick to remove it.

If you're not planing on using the eltronics in it, just submerge it in the Pine-sol for a few days. The paint will bubble and peal right off. I use it for restoring and rebuilding models all the time.

Short of that, the only other thing I can think of is wet sanding the smeared areas with fine grain sandpaper to remove the surface area.

Pine-Sol has worked for me on several occasions albeit with limited success. When a re-paint job was required I used oven cleaner, believe it or not. I sprayed the kit with the most caustic solution and placed the model within a plastic garbage bag overnight. The paint was easily removed and I was left with a very clean surface to paint yet again.

However, the above solution may not be an option for Slappy.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Just_Bob said:

Gen. Jack O'Neill said:

Slappy The Vulcan said:
Picked up a playmates Voyager at a thrift store for .99 cents, It's in BAAAAD Shape. it looks like somebody painted a few of the windows black and white with model paint....but never finished....it also looks (as near as I can tell that they tried to remove the paint on some of said windows with thinner maybe. this has caused the paint on one of the phaser strips to smear causing discoloration on part of the upper saucer. any way I can remove the paint without causing more "damage" and possibly fix any discoloration? I'd love to post pics, but I have no Idea how....any help on that would be much appreciated as well.

Try Pine-sol.

The Playmates Voyager was molded in it's base color, so it might only lighten the smeared on paint a bit. But Pine-sol and a bit of elbow grease might do the trick to remove it.

If you're not planing on using the eltronics in it, just submerge it in the Pine-sol for a few days. The paint will bubble and peal right off. I use it for restoring and rebuilding models all the time.

Short of that, the only other thing I can think of is wet sanding the smeared areas with fine grain sandpaper to remove the surface area.

Pine-Sol has worked for me on several occasions albeit with limited success. When a re-paint job was required I used oven cleaner, believe it or not. I sprayed the kit with the most caustic solution and placed the model within a plastic garbage bag overnight. The paint was easily removed and I was left with a very clean surface to paint yet again.

However, the above solution may not be an option for Slappy.

Yeah, oven cleaner works nicely with polystyrene, though it will attack some other plastics (vinyls, for instance). Whereas Pine-sol works reasonably well and, in my experience, won't harm any plastic I've worked with so far.

The paint job on the original ship isn't very good to begin with, so I'd consider just stripping it down entirely and repainting it.

The whole point here, ultimately, I think, is "what do you want to do with this?" Are you trying to turn this Voyager into a display-quality model or just restoring it to the original "toy" state? Are you looking to get really detailed (moreso than the original toy was, turning it into more of a work of art)? Or just going with basic "looks like I remember it from my TV screen" state?

All of this matters quite a bit.

Still, once it's been painted like this, your best bet is really to just strip it down entirely, and repaint it. Obviously, before doing that you'd want to totally disassemble it (which will take some effort too, since some portions of the Playmates ships were glued together... use a sharp x-acto knife and a LOT of patience!) You do NOT want to submerge the electrical elements in ANY form of cleaner.

 

[Forbin]

I use a paint remover Polly-S made specifically for plastic models. Only thing is, I've hade the bottle for YEARS, and I don't know if it's still made. Works great, though.

 

[USS Jack Riley]

Pine-Sol??!! Oven Cleaner??!!

Wow. Hadn't thought of those before, but not having much of a chemical background, I wouldn't have given it much thought.

I have also heard use of brake fluid before.

This does give me fruit for thought, howeever. I have a bunch of models that I unboxed recently. Needless to say, after 15 years in a box they, well, looked like they had been in a box for 15 years. IOW, they are in several pieces at this point.

I had thopught about doing a full up redo of each kit, but some pieces are missing, so I am going to take a hint from Forbin and do some kit-bashing.

The main problem I had was getting the paint off. Now I know. The best part is that my wife will think I am planning on cleaning the house!!

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Note that when we talk about submerging in in Pine-Sol, we're not talking about the diluted form you're supposed to use for cleaning your countertops... we're talking about just as it comes out of the bottle (or with a small, and I mean SMALL, amount of water added). It needs to be quite strong. "Washing" level concentration will simply give you a nice clean "old paint job."

 

[USS Jack Riley]

Thank you for the clarification. I figured that is what you meant, but nice to know before I dip my models in to a vat of solution that ends up eating the plastic!

 

[Forbin]

Rubber gloves might be a good idea, btw.

 

[Slappy The Vulcan]

Thanks for everyones responses, I will try to get some pictures up in a couple of days, so you guys can have a look at it, (my wife and digital camera are out of town, took some pics with my cell phone, but you can't see the discoloration in them.) anyway, as to what I want to do with it? not sure at this point, I'm not very skilled at model making (esp. the painting part) so I buy light and sound ships and admire others work instead. anyway, I thought it would be neat to detail it a bit more, maybe even give it a custom name/registry number (I've always liked u.s.s. ranger) for some reason, I'd like the level of detail to be around the level of the AA ships they are doing now...I may try the pine-sol thing, if it doesn't work....at least the ship will smell great!

 

[FrontLine]

a day late, but I have found "Wesleys Bleach-White" (used for lceaning tires so the white walls / raised white letters on your tires looks sparkling) to be a very effective, safe, and fast tool for removing paint from polystyrene models.