Friends,

To follow up on the paint removal thread below:

A client has reported heavy graffiti on a couple of cars to be used in an event soon. I've been told that any Home Depot/Lowes/etc. sells "graffiti removal" stripper. Has anyone here had any experience with these products? Do they strip the paint you want on the car as well as the spray paint? Can anyone recommend an alternative technique? (The cars are old commuter cars, painted sheet metal--I believe a repaint and other rehab is in order anyway, but for now they just want the graffiti gone.)

The only time I used a product like that it came in a spray can & removed the paint also. That was several years ago & things may have advanced now where that doesn't happen or the paint under what i tried to remove was just bad to start with..................................wooly

In 1992 we had much of the rented "Daylight" trainset tagged at Golden Gate Railroad Museum. We publicized this and got assistance and free or low-cost materials donated by several graffiti removal firms. We found that no one graffiti remover worked on all the spray paints involved. On each type of spray paint, you have to experiment with several different brands of graffiti remover. They all needed time to soak in. Foggy mornings and/or heavily overcast days are best for this sort of work. If it's too hot and sunny, the graffiti remover either dries out before softening the graffiti, or it starts attacking the original paint underneath.

Plastic scrubbrushes and plastic scrub pads designed for washing dishes provide the right amount of scrubbing action without abrading the paint you want to keep intact. Natural-bristle and nylon-bristle scrubbrushes also worked OK. Lots of elbow grease is needed with this approach.

A garden hose and trigger-handle spray head are helpful in washing off the goopy mixture of graffiti remover and broken-down paint. Hosing the surface off also helpskeep it cool enough to work on.

The sooner you remove graffiti, the less work it is.

Even if the RR car has excellent topcoat paint - Imron, for example - graffiti remover can eventually penetrate through paint porosity and attack the primer underneath. especially if the base metal surface prep was substandard (i.e. stainless steel, inadequately roughed up before spraying primer). So experiment in an inconspicuous area first.

Good luck!
- Doug Debs

This is maybe not the place for this news item, but on Monday night around 10.00pm, several youths were spraypainting boxcars, in a siding on Canadian Pacific's, North Toronto Subdivision, when one of the youths was killed by an east frieght.

Contact Toryon Technologies Inc.
165 W. Mittel Dr., Wood Dale, IL 60191 phone 630-616-8600

AmerChem Product Graffiti Remover 2

At IRM we used this on some Chicago 'L' cars that had been tagged. It [along with elbow grease] did a good job of removal.

I was called all but a Communist the last time I suggested it, but I still believe the best way to combat grafitti is to make spray paint much harder to obtain. This could include keeping it in locked cabinets, like cigarettes, in stores, and raising the price from a dollar a can to about eight times that. Some of the paint used for grafitti is stolen, but somewhat older "artists" who consider themselves budding Picassos do buy the stuff. It would inconvenience ordinary users a little, but it probably wouldn't kill me to paint my deck furniture with a brush.